Rotting Research: How Link Rot Impacts the Integrity of Scholarly Publishing

We have all experienced link rot at some point, those broken links that exist on websites we visit. But this problem persists beyond websites; it is also prevalent in research. This session focuses on how rampant link rot is in scholarly research, with over 36% of all citation links being broken. Even the technologies we created, like DOIs, have little to no effect. We will review a recent cross-discipline study examining how link rot affects different disciplines in scholarship. We will discuss how librarians play a part in the problem, ways to mitigate this problem, possible solutions, and, hopefully, a way forward.