Link rot: Archiving challenges for small publishers series

This post is part of a short series of posts regarding some of the challenges that exist for small publishers of open access monographs.Other posts discuss metadata challenges and where existing pathways to preservation may exclude the small publisher due to various platform requirements.Link rot is an issue which affects all areas of the web.However, it is particularly important for the scholarly record and the ability to build on the work of others, verify results, and identify the provenance of ideas, metadata, and research.Approximately 60-70% of links fail to resolve after 10 years. 1 For CrossREF DOIs, a small sample was recently analysed and it returned a hit rate of 97%.However, this still meant that 3% of DOIs did not resolve. 2All of these findings have implications for the archiving of books and their long-term accessibility and discoverability.DOIs are known as a Persistent Identifier (PID).However, even if the failure rate is only 3%, what does that mean for the wider scholarly record?For works which are only available via a publisher website (or a personal