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Over the past six months, we鈥檝e begun receiving an increased number of enquiries from researchers about Perma.cc. Some publishers - particularly in Law and Social Science, where citations to non-scholarly sources are more common - now ask authors to cite web sources via a Perma.cc link. The underlying problem is 鈥渓ink rot鈥�, where over time links to webpages stop working, due to websites being restructured or content being deleted.

What Perma.cc does

, built by Harvard's Library Innovation Lab, is a preservation service for the sources you cite. When you paste in a URL, the system captures the page as it appears at that moment, then provides a short, stable link (perma.cc/XXXX-XXXX) to use in your citation alongside the original URL. If the page later changes or vanishes, your reader can still see what you saw.

It's aimed squarely at the sources that fall outside the DOI ecosystem: government and policy documents; news coverage; blog posts; working papers; organisational web pages.听

Two limits are worth knowing:

• If a source already has a DOI or another persistent identifier, cite that instead.
• The terms of service require that what you capture is freely available to the public, so paywalled articles and subscription database records are not eligible for a Perma.cc link.

Requesting a free sponsored account

The Library is now a Perma.cc registrar, which means we can sponsor accounts for University staff and students at no cost. A sponsored account lifts the ten-link trial limit entirely: you get your own folder, visible only to you and the Library's registrars, with unlimited link creation.

To request a sponsored account, create a free account at , then fill in a . We'll aim to get you set up within two working days.

Steve Carlton, Open Research Librarian: Open Access

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