WebCite

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Not to be confused with Website.
For a guide to using WebCite within Wikipedia, see Help:Using WebCite. For the unrelated Wikipedia "cite web" editing tool, see Wikipedia:Citation templates.

WebCite
Available inEnglish
OwnerUniversity of Toronto[1]
Created byGunther Eysenbach
URLWebCitation.org
CommercialNo
Launched1997; 27 years ago (1997)
Current statusView historical archives only, no new archives

WebCite is an on-demand archive site, designed to digitally preserve scientific and educationally important material on the web by taking snapshots of Internet contents as they existed at the time when a blogger or a scholar cited or quoted from it. The preservation service enabled verifiability of claims supported by the cited sources even when the original web pages are being revised, removed, or disappear for other reasons, an effect known as link rot.

The site no longer accepts new archive requests; old archive snapshots can still be viewed.

Service features

WebCite allowed for preservation of all types of web content, including

MIME type
, and content length.

WebCite was a non-profit consortium supported by publishers and editors,[who?] and it could be used by individuals without charge.[clarification needed] It was one of the first services to offer on-demand archiving of pages, a feature later adopted by many other archiving services, such as archive.today and the Wayback Machine. It did not do web page crawling.

History

Conceived in 1997 by

Google Cache and the Internet Archive expanded their crawling (which started in 1996),[3] WebCite was the only one allowing "on-demand" archiving by users. WebCite also offered interfaces to scholarly journals and publishers to automate the archiving of cited links. By 2008, over 200 journals had begun routinely using WebCite.[4]

WebCite was formerly a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium.[1] In response a 2012 message on Twitter relating to WebCite's former membership of the consortium, Eysenbach commented that "WebCite has no funding, and IIPC charges €4000 per year in annual membership fees."[5]

WebCite "feeds its content" to other

amicus brief in the Supreme Court of the United States case of MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.[6]

Sometime between July 9 and 17, 2019, WebCite stopped accepting new archiving requests.[7][non-primary source needed] In a further outage, between about October 29, 2021 and June 24, 2023, no archived content was available, only the main page worked.

Fundraising

WebCite ran a fund-raising campaign using

Amazon EC2 cloud hosting and legal support. As of 2013 it remained undecided whether WebCite would continue as a non-profit or as a for-profit entity.[9]

Business model

The term "WebCite" is a registered trademark.[10] WebCite did not charge individual users, journal editors and publishers[11] any fee to use their service. WebCite earned revenue from publishers who wanted to "have their publications analyzed and cited webreferences archived".[1] Early support was from the University of Toronto.[1]

Copyright issues

WebCite maintained the legal position that its archiving activities

robot exclusion standards, the absence of which creates an "implied license" for web archive services to preserve the content.[1]

In a similar case involving Google's web caching activities, on January 19, 2006, the

Field v. Google (CV-S-04-0413-RCJ-LRL), holding that fair use and an "implied license" meant that Google's caching of Web pages did not constitute copyright violation.[1] The "implied license" referred to general Internet standards.[1]

DMCA requests

According to their policy, after receiving legitimate

DMCA requests from the copyright holders, WebCite would remove saved pages from public access, as the archived pages are still under the safe harbor of being citations. The pages were removed to a "dark archive" and in cases of legal controversies or evidence requests, there was pay-per-view access of "$200 (up to 5 snapshots) plus $100 for each further 10 snapshots" to the copyrighted content.[12]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "WebCite Consortium FAQ". WebCitation.org. WebCite. Archived from the original on August 11, 2021. Retrieved May 15, 2018 – via Internet Archive.
  2. PMID 9831581
    . BL Shelfmark 2330.000000.
  3. ^ "Fixing Broken Links on the Internet". Internet Archive blog. October 25, 2013.
  4. ^
    PMID 16403724
    .
  5. ^ Eysenbach, Gunther [@eysenbach] (June 12, 2012). "@ReaderMeter @sennoma WebCite has no funding, and IIPC charges 4000 Euro/yr in membership fees" (Tweet). Archived from the original on January 3, 2022 – via Twitter.
  6. ^ Cohen, Norm (January 29, 2007). "Courts Turn to Wikipedia, but Selectively". The New York Times.
  7. ^ "WebCite 17th July 2019". July 17, 2019. Archived from the original on July 17, 2019. Retrieved January 17, 2021.
  8. ^ "Fund WebCite". Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved December 6, 2013.
  9. ^ "Conversation between GiveWell and WebCite on 4/10/13" (PDF). GiveWell. Retrieved October 18, 2009. Dr. Eysenbach is trying to decide whether WebCite should continue as a non-profit project or a business with revenue streams built into the system.
  10. ^ "WebCite Legal and Copyright Information". WebCitation.org. WebCite. Archived from the original on July 25, 2008. Retrieved June 16, 2009.
  11. ^ "WebCite Member List". WebCitation.org. WebCite Consortium. Archived from the original on July 25, 2008. Retrieved June 16, 2009. Membership is currently free
  12. ^ "WebCite takedown requests policy". WebCitation.org. WebCite. Archived from the original on April 22, 2021. Retrieved May 14, 2017.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WebCite&oldid=1187174568"