The Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 9th ed, a.k.a. the “McGill Guide” now strongly recommends Perma.cc!

“In an effort to prevent link rot (broken links or pages in the future), when you cite to an item found online, you must provide a Permanent or Archived URL after the regular URL in square brackets. A permanent link (also called a Permalink or Archived link) is a URL that is intended to maintain permanence for many years despite the changes to links on a website that may occur in the future.  The McGill Guide strongly recommends the Perma.CC system to create permanent links where none is provided by the site you are citing.”

Read more here.  The McGill Guide other style guides including The Bluebook: a Uniform System of Legal Citation and the Chicago Manual of Style in recommending Perma.cc for the preservation of URLs in citations.

Do you have a Perma.cc account yet to keep your links from rotting? Sign up here!

An academic library recently reached out to us regarding literature on the severity of link-rot. Having these in one place can be useful for anyone looking into it, though – find a collection of these below!

• The study that inspired Perma.cc’s creation: this study of law journals from ’99 to 2011 found more than 70% of the URLs do not link to the originally cited information, as well as 50% of the URLs in US Supreme Court opinions.
•  In a study from the Hiberlink team of 3.5 million articles from 1997 to 2012, they found that in 2012 alone 22% of Elsevier article hyperlinks had rotted, with the percentage higher for each previous year,
  • 4/5ths of all 2012 papers contained at least one link that suffered reference rot, i.e., at least one reference to web content was either dead or not archived until some time after the publishing date.
  • 75% of all links in the study were not cached on an archiving site within two weeks of the article’s publication date, meaning the content might not reflect the citing author’s original intent.
• A more recent study by the same group found that of the links examined, for those that still worked, 75% of them led to content that was different from what was originally referenced.
• A study from Nanyang Technological University covering 7 years of science journals specifically showed 31% of links rotted, with .edu links at the highest rate: 36%.

At a library and wondering how best to let those there know how they can use Perma to fight link-rot? Many libraries set up a simple LibGuide with a contact email for those who want to utilize Perma.cc at their institution, such UMass’ here (archive) or Virginia Tech’s here (archive).

Perma now offers individual user subscriptions, organizational accounts, and free accounts for those at academic institutions. Perma was made at and is supported by the Harvard Law library, part of the oldest library system in the United States, and supported by a network of libraries. Use it to make a short-link to a preserved copy of the webpage you’re citing to – a link you can trust won’t die or go away. Nearly 1,000,000 citations saved!

Here’s Perma’s November stats as of Nov 28th, per Westlaw:

• 40 state and federal court opinions, including the highest courts in:
  • Hawaii
  • Iowa
  • Michigan, as well as
  • The U.S. Appeal Court, Third Circuit, and
  • Appellate courts in New York, Colorado, Illinois, Washington, California and more.
• 417 law review articles
• 23 briefs, and
• 7 additional court filings, including trial court documents and trial court orders.

Sign up here to use Perma.cc to ensure your own linked sources are safe. We are also now offering individual unlimited-use accounts!

Perma.cc keeps popping up: per Westlaw, in the past two weeks Perma.cc Links have showed up in:

• 27 state and federal court opinions, including the highest courts in:
  • Vermont
  • Illinois
  • Washington
  • Michigan
  • Montana
  • Colorado
• 119 law review articles
• 15 court filings, including briefs and trial court documents

Sign up here to use Perma.cc to ensure your own linked sources are safe. We are also now offering individual unlimited-use accounts!

Lots of Perma appearances over the past two weeks! Per Westlaw, in the two weeks Perma.cc Links have showed up in:

• 24 state and federal court opinions
• 192 law review articles
• 16 court filings, including briefs and trial court documents

Sign up here to use Perma.cc to ensure your own linked sources are safe. We are also now offering individual unlimited-use accounts!

I had the pleasure of manning a table at the BU Law School LibraryFest this past month! Librarian Shira Megerman invited me to discuss the Library Innovation Lab projects with BU Law Students, including Perma.cc and H2O.

B.U. Law Tower. Image c/o Wikimedia

There was significant interest from the law students, most of which were 1L’s, about how Perma.cc tackles the issue of link rot. As I’ve found with others, they hadn’t considered the potential impact of link rot on their research or citations, but quickly understood both its impacts and how Perma addresses them. Many were also intrigued by H2O, in particular how it lets instructors create a textbook for their course that would be either free (when accessed online) or a fraction of the cost of a traditional casebook (when distributed through a print-on-demand service).

My thanks again to Shira and the BU Library staff for their friendliness and energy! – Brett

Per Westlaw, in the past week Perma.cc Links have showed up in:

• 9 state and federal court opinions, including opinions by the highest court in
  • Illinois
  • Washington
  • Massachusetts
• 35 law review articles
• 5 court filings, and an environmental law forms guide.

Sign up here to use Perma.cc to ensure your own linked sources are safe. We also offer organization-wide accounts and are now offering individual unlimited-use accounts!

We’re excited to announce a change to the way Perma.cc handles our users’ efforts to preserve web pages that have generic no-archive metatags.

In the past, when someone used Perma to preserve a webpage with a generic no-archive metatag (such as a New York Times or NPR article) the resulting Perma record was automatically, unalterably set to “Private.” We’ve found that this practice was unnecessary and often a source of confusion and frustration for our users.

Going forward, when someone uses Perma to preserve a page with a generic no-archive tag, that Perma record will not automatically be set to “Private.” Instead, these records will be public by default, and users will have the option to manually make them private if they or their institutions wish. In addition, existing Perma records with generic no-archive metatags will remain private, but users now can make those records public.

Perma.cc will continue to recognize any Perma-specific “noarchive” metatag or a Perma-specific robots.txt exclusion. Any Perma records of sites implementing those methods will be private.

We’re enthusiastic about the way this change will provide even greater access to links and citations that’ve been protected through Perma. Feel free to reach out to us at  info at perma.cc with any questions!

Perma.cc‘s use in the legal realm continues to grow. Per Westlaw, in the past week Perma Links made appearances in:

• 11 court opinions, including opinions by the highest court in
  • Massachusetts
  • Vermont
  • Maryland
  • Iowa
• 34 law review articles
• 6 court filings, including 3 Supreme Court briefs.

Perma.cc use is encouraged by The Bluebook and the Chicago Manual of Style. Sign up here to use Perma.cc to ensure your own linked sources are safe. We also offer organization-wide accounts and are now offering individual unlimited-use accounts!