The emergence of the web has fundamentally affected most aspects of information communication, including scholarly communication. The immediacy that characterizes publishing information to the web, as well as accessing it, allows for a dramatic increase in the speed of dissemination of scholarly knowledge. But, the transition from a paper-based to a web-based scholarly communication system also poses challenges. In this paper, we focus on reference rot, the combination of link rot and content drift to which references to web resources included in Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) articles are subject. We investigate the extent to which reference rot impacts the ability to revisit the web context that surrounds STM articles some time after their publication. We do so on the basis of a vast collection of articles from three corpora that span publication years 1997 to 2012. For over one million references to web resources extracted from over 3.5 million articles, we determine whether the HTTP URI is still responsive on the live web and whether web archives contain an archived snapshot representative of the state the referenced resource had at the time it was referenced. We observe that the fraction of articles containing references to web resources is growing steadily over time. We find one out of five STM articles suffering from reference rot, meaning it is impossible to revisit the web context that surrounds them some time after their publication. When only considering STM articles that contain references to web resources, this fraction increases to seven out of ten. We suggest that, in order to safeguard the long-term integrity of the web-based scholarly record, robust solutions to combat the reference rot problem are required. In conclusion, we provide a brief insight into the directions that are explored with this regard in the context of the Hiberlink project.

The HTTP-based Memento framework bridges the present and past Web. It facilitates obtaining representations of prior states of a given resource by introducing datetime negotiation and TimeMaps. Datetime negotiation is a variation on content negotiation that leverages the given resource's URI and a user agent's preferred datetime. TimeMaps are lists that enumerate URIs of resources that encapsulate prior states of the given resource. The framework also facilitates recognizing a resource that encapsulates a frozen prior state of another resource.

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The Open Annotation Core Data Model specifies an interoperable framework for creating associations between related resources, called annotations, using a methodology that conforms to the Architecture of the World Wide Web. Open Annotations can easily be shared between platforms, with sufficient richness of expression to satisfy complex requirements while remaining simple enough to also allow for the most common use cases, such as attaching a piece of text to a single web resource. This paper presents the W3C Open Annotation Community Group specification and the rationale behind the scoping and technical decisions that were made. It also motivates interoperable Annotations via use cases, and provides a brief analysis of the advantages over previous specifications.