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Comment by johndough | Hacker News Reader

And just like that, several hundred scientific papers which used git.io links become incorrect https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=git.io

Changing the content of papers after they have been published is usually impossible or at least extremely difficult, depending on the publisher.

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Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) are nowadays the academia variant of URLs. DOIs are somewhat similar to URNs, they don't resolve directly somewhere in the web but are more a kind of identifier. There are various tools for resolving, see for instance https://www.doi.org/tools.html

Platforms such as https://zenodo.org/ allow for uploading digital artifacts such as publication attachments, supplementary codes or measurement/survey data and assigning them permanently with a DOI.

Zenodo may go down, but maybe some hard disk survives and resolving that DOIs will be possible at some future web system. DOIS are built to last!

I'm confused, what's the relationship between DOIs and git.io? Are you suggesting people should be using DOIs to link to source code from within papers?

Not GP but yes. https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/archiving-a-github-r...

The git.io link in at least the first paper that comes up on your search (https://git.io/sosr15-int-demo) appears to have been archived by archive.org, which shows the redirection and then follows it to the archived version of the final github page.

I don't know how common it is for these links to have been caught by the archive, but potentially all is not lost.

There is an archiveteam project that scrapes URL shorteners, so hopefully more than one might expect.

I wonder if anyone is working on an archive?

If anyone is it would probably be the people over at ArchiveTeam / URLTeam: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam

It looks like they're active, but not working on git.io URLs: https://tracker.archiveteam.org:1338/status

I have no idea how to submit shortened URLs to URLTeam, but if anyone can find out I'll be happy to scrape URLs out of that list of Google Scholar PDFs.

It is unlikely because it is very difficult and maybe illegal to scrape research papers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz for example.

I think they meant an archive of git.io links.

I mean that it is hard to scrape these git.io links used in the research papers to build the archive. Unless of course, if Github provides a DB dump, it would help everyone a lot.

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