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Web-based content may seem persistent, but its long-term accessibility is not ensured. One-quarter of all web pages that existed at any point between 2013 and 2023 had disappeared by the end of that period (Chapekis et al., 2024). The availability of content was found to decline with age: 38% of web pages that were accessible in 2013 could no longer be reached in 2023, while 8% of websites that were active at some point in 2023 were already gone by October 2023 (Chapekis et al., 2024). This data loss has practical consequences. A 2014 study revealed that approximately 50% of all hyperlinks cited in decisions of the United States Supreme Court were no longer reliable because (1) the originally referenced content was missing, (2) the content had significantly changed, or (3) the links were completely broken (Zittrain et al., 2014). In 2019, the platform Myspace lost all music uploaded before 2016 during a server migration. This resulted in the permanent deletion of over 50 million songs from 14 million artists (Hern, 2019). These incidents highlight the importance of addressing the long-term digital accessibility and preservation of web content and of finding infrastructural solutions to safeguard it. The long-term accessibility of web content is also particularly important with regard to good scientific practice (ALLEA, 2023).
Data loss and a lack of long-term accessibility also raises concerns about scholarly blogs, blogs that are written by scholars or are concerned with scholarly topics, which will be the focus of this article (Littek, 2012; Puschmann and Mahrt, 2012; Wenninger, 2019). Scholarly blogs enable the distribution of scholarly output both inside the academic environment and outside of it (Luzón, 2013). Compared to traditional academic publishing venues, scholarly blogs are an accessible, cheap, fast, open, and more informal way of communicating research for both authors and recipients (Burton, 2015). Since scholarly blogs are particularly vulnerable to data loss and disappearance, the necessity to develop strategies to preserve scholarly blogs, for example through digital preservation efforts, has become increasingly urgent. Digital preservation ensures the long-term access to digitally stored information, for example through web archiving (Lee et al., 2002). Web archiving contributes to the preservation of cultural heritage and knowledge (Kalb et al., 2013). A common way to practice web archiving is through the internet Archive, an initiative aimed at developing a digital library of web pages (Internet Archive, n.d.; Kalb et al., 2013). Efforts to support the web archiving of blogs have been made in the BlogForever project, a project aimed at developing archiving strategies for weblogs. However, the during the project developed repository developed during the project is no longer available (Pampel and Rothfritz, 2024).
Furthermore, within the scholarly literature on blogs, the topic of their long-term accessibility has been little addressed (Hank, 2011). While digital information infrastructures have been organised around other types of scholarly output (e.g. textual publication types such as books and journals) to ensure their permanent accessibility, these processes and infrastructures have not been ensured when it comes to scholarly blogs, which bears the risk of information loss (Burton, 2015; Hank, 2011; Kalb et al., 2013; Kasioumis et al., 2014). Scholarly blogs pose legal and technical challenges for preservation, since they embed dynamic content such as pictures, videos, links and comments (Burton, 2015; Hank, 2011). Even though authors of traditional scholarly publications rarely view the long-term accessibility of their content to be their responsibility (Altenhöner and Schrimpf, 2014), the long-term accessibility of blogs has predominantly been discussed by bloggers themselves (Fenner, 2022; Hank, 2011) or projects concerned with building infrastructure to preserve scholarly blogs (Fenner, 2022; Guilleux, 2024; Kalb et al., 2013; Lazaridou et al., 2013). A study concerned with the digital preservation of scholarly blogs found that bloggers (1) view their blogs to be part of the scholarly record and (2) are interested in their blogs being preserved (Hank, 2011).
Within the scholarly literature on the topic, there is no overview of existing scholarly blogs or data on how scholarly blogs are integrated into already existing digital research and information infrastructure, which we define to be a shared distribution of social, organisational, and technical systems and activities that enable and support research practices (Bowker et al., 2010). Therefore, we define information infrastructure facilities to entail libraries, but also technical and organisational measures that facilitate the reuse of scholarly blogs. In light of these challenges, this study aims to investigate how scholarly blogs are currently maintained, preserved, and integrated into scholarly infrastructure. We pursue the following research questions:
RQ1.
How do scholarly blogs vary across disciplines in terms of activity, institutional affiliation and language?
RQ2.
How are scholarly blogs and their content already being integrated into existing digital research and information infrastructures to support long-term accessibility and preservation?
RQ3.
What efforts do scholarly bloggers apply to facilitate the accessibility and reusability of their blog contents?
To answer these questions, we collected 866 German scholarly blogs, and developed three sets of analysis criteria that (1) categorise the blogs into research fields, monitor their activity and determine their institutional affiliation and language, (2) uncover ways that scholarly blogs are already being integrated into digital research and information infrastructure and (3) discover other efforts scholarly bloggers apply to make their content accessible and reusable. We discuss our findings in turn. The paper concludes with recommendations of stakeholders with the potential to further facilitate the long-term accessibility of scholarly blogs.
