"Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations"

Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert, and Lawrence Lessig have self-archived "Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

We document a serious problem of reference rot: more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs found within U.S. Supreme Court opinions do not link to the originally cited information.

Given that, we propose a solution for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.

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Author: Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.