Robust Links — stop your links dying
Roughly half the web addresses cited in scholarly articles are dead within a few years. This pairs each of your links with a fixed copy in the Internet Archive and gives you the markup to paste in, so a reader always reaches something — even after the original page is gone.
What a robust link is
An ordinary link points at one address; when that address dies, the link is dead. A robust link also records a fixed archived copy and the date it was taken, in data- attributes on the same link. Readers still click through to the live page — but the copy is right there when the live page is gone. It is a plain HTML convention (mementoweb.org/robustlinks), no plugin required.
Best of all: use a DOI
A DOI never rots — that is the whole point of it. Where the thing you are linking to has a DOI, link the DOI. Robust links are for everything else: government pages, datasets without a DOI, news, author homepages. For your own articles' dead DOIs, that is a different repair — the DOI Members console repoints them at the live page.
Why it counts for indexing
Reference rot is one of the quiet reasons older scholarship becomes unverifiable. A journal whose links still resolve years later is a journal a careful editor — and an indexer — trusts. It costs nothing and no reader ever has to know it is there.
