We’ve said it time and again: link rot is everywhere on the internet. Anyone who is concerned with having reliable internet citations should know that they need to be proactive about preserving their URLs. No one wants to revisit a blog post, or a wikipedia edit, or their genealogy research and find that they’ve lost a reliable source. When you’re faced with a 404 that means more effort to track down that information again, whether it be on the Wayback Machine or at a new location. And that’s if it exists somewhere else at all.
Since its inception Perma has helped law journals and courts create permanent citations for their work without any cap on the amount of links created. Over 350 institutions have joined us as registrars, administering accounts for academic use. These registrars act as administrators helping patrons navigate and troubleshoot. Everyone else not associated with a registrar has been able to work with Perma as well, but once their 10 free links a month dried up, they were out of luck.
We’ve gotten requests in the past from non-academically affiliated users who are hoping to have access to more than ten free links (they’ll even pay for it, they said!) Well – we’re all about experimenting here at the Library *Innovation* Lab, so we’ve put together a way for individuals to pay a monthly subscription fee to access unlimited Perma usage. For now, our price is $20 a month. Subscribers have access to the same Perma platform but now with the ability to create as many links as you need (that batch link tool all the sudden becomes very useful!)
Upgrading is easy. There’s a link right below the URL input on your Perma.cc homepage that says “Upgrade to unlimited Perma Links”:
Clicking that link will bring you to a contact form to let us know you’re interested! Someone from our team will be in touch to get your unlimited account set up. If you’re new to Perma, you can start off right away with a premium account if you’d like. Just check the box during sign up and we’ll also be in touch:
Of course, those affiliated with academic institutions and courts will continue to have access to Perma for free, and you can still make 10 links per month as a non-paying user. But we’ve heard from enough of you that sometimes 10 links just isn’t enough! This is a new path for Perma, so we’d love to hear feedback about our model. If you’re an individual user, what would your ideal system be?