DataShare Spotlight: The Hiberlink project, and anticipating change in a data repository

Posted on 20 March 2025 by Evelyn Williams

While looking through DataShare for datasets about research practice, I found the Hiberlink project dataset [1], which perfectly illustrates some of the challenges the changing digital research landscape poses to good research practice.

The Hiberlink project investigated ‘reference rot’, which happens when a publication includes links that no longer contain the information the authors originally cited. The Hiberlink researchers found one in five articles in their sample contained at least one link which didn’t resolve to the originally referenced content [2].

This project garnered lots of press coverage around 2015-16, and is just as relevant 10 years on, still resurfacing on Twitter every so often. Sometimes the coverage takes a negative bent, from those who view the reproducibility crisis as proof that academia is a waste of tax money and human potential. More often though, it comes from people advocating better, more open research practices.

Richard Tobin, who deposited the Hiberlink dataset, did a good job of completing the metadata and helpfully included a link to the project’s website, hiberlink.org. However, if you follow this link it appears to have expired and been purchased by an unknown party selling “virtual data rooms”. None of us are safe.

Screenshot of the Hiberlink website having been taken over by a company selling something called virtual data rooms.

Unknown author, “What Is a Virtual Data Room? A Guide to Secure Online Document Management,” Hiberlink (https://hiberlink.org : 5 February 2025); archived at Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/) > https://hiberlink.org > 19 March; citing a capture dated 15 March 2025.

Why links die and why it matters

Change is a given in research projects nowadays. The path of enquiry shifts, researchers leave the university and others join, and new tools emerge for carrying out research and sharing findings. Researchers share their work on blogs, project websites, and a seemingly endless chain of social media platforms, moving with the digital tides.

But digital repositories, which are often modelled after physical archives and aim to take a static snapshot of research, can struggle to represent research projects in flux. This article takes a look at how nascent web archives used archiving frameworks taken from the field of librarianship [3].

Traceability is a core tenant of open research, but traceability can be difficult online. Digital and web-based resources often evolve over time, unlike traditionally published articles. URLs in publications or metadata may expire, or the content on the linked page may radically change. Changing content makes the research process less transparent and makes research findings harder to verify and reproduce.

Academic staff are often encouraged to have a strong online presence. Sharing research online is considered an important part of doing ‘open research’, and a strong online presence is seen as important for academics’ personal career development. But most of us don’t often think much about the web of links created during a research project. These links can drift and degrade as researchers leave an institution or move on to new projects, as a pot of funding runs dry, or as reminders to renew a domain registration end up in a spam folder.

The case of web domains is especially interesting, as they can be bought by anyone. Old links to defunct external web pages may lend credibility to questionable groups or dodgy businesses that claim a domain once a researcher’s registration expires.

Why links pose a challenge for data management

While depositing a research dataset in an open access repository seems like a natural conclusion to a project, you might be horrified to learn that the work doesn’t stop here. In data management plans we think about how we can share, store and preserve our data for the future. We don’t usually consider how all the peripheral stuff around our data might also need to be preserved and maintained.

We usually recommend that instead of using a live URL to link to a project website, researchers cite archived copies of the web pages and use persistent identifiers (like DOIs) where possible. The authors of the Hiberlink paper encourage researchers to reference archived versions of the web, like the non-profit Internet Archive. But as could have been the case with the Hiberlink project, linking to an archived copy isn’t ideal if a project website is still being actively updated and you want to direct people to the most recent version.

What can we do?

So, beyond using persistent identifiers, how can we make sure that a repository doesn’t contain a bunch of dead links? The obvious answer is that researchers should periodically review all their items in the research repositories at every university they’ve worked at, and update the metadata… forever? As is often the case with good research practice, solutions often require an ongoing investment of time that researchers simply don’t have.

Maybe as data archivists, we have to accept that metadata will decay, and that messy metadata is better than invisible research data.

Flow chart showing the data management process, with 'Update metadata' stuck inside an endless loop.

The metadata update hell loop

How can you avoid reference rot?

For help figuring out how you can preserve your websites, see the university’s resources on web archiving [4]. Dr Alice Austin does regular training sessions on web archiving, which I recently attended and found very useful. And if you’d like advice on linking all your archived research outputs together in a way that ensures they’ll be useful in years to come, get in touch with us!

Learn more about the Hiberlink project

You can read more about these issues in the archived versions of hiberlink.org from before March 2022 in the Internet Archive [5].

If you’d like to read more about reference rot, the authors of this project wrote two great papers on this phenomenon:

Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot [2] looks at reference rot in over 3.5 million STEM articles from 1997-2012 and finds that one in five contains a link which doesn’t resolve to the originally referenced content.

No More 404s: Predicting Referenced Link Rot in Scholarly Articles for Pro-Active Archiving [6] explores the use of machine learning to identify links at risk of rotting.

While writing this blog post I spoke with Richard Tobin, one of the researchers on the Hiberlink project, and he had this to say: “Neither of us is working on related research now, but it would be interesting if someone were to take the data and see how much further the links have decayed.”

Links

[1] Tobin, Richard; Grover, Claire; Zhou, Ke. (2015). Hiberlink project data, 1997-2012 [dataset]. University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/230.

[2] Klein M, Van de Sompel H, Sanderson R, Shankar H, Balakireva L, Zhou K, et al. (2014). Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot. PLoS ONE 9(12): e115253. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253

[3] Hegarty, K. (2022). The invention of the archived web: tracing the influence of library frameworks on web archiving infrastructure. Internet Histories, 6(4), 432–451. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2022.2103988

[4] The university’s web archiving service: https://library.ed.ac.uk/heritage-collections/collections-and-search/archives/digital-archives-and-preservation/web-archiving

[5] Archived version of Hiberlink project website. https://web.archive.org/web/20220306174247/http://hiberlink.org/

[6] Ke Zhou, Claire Grover, Martin Klein, and Richard Tobin. (2015). No More 404s: Predicting Referenced Link Rot in Scholarly Articles for Pro-Active Archiving. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL ’15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 233–236. https://doi.org/10.1145/2756406.2756940

DataShare spotlight: Debates on slavery and abolition held by student debating societies at the University of Edinburgh, 1765-1870

Posted on 12 March 2025 by kmunro

The best part of my job is looking through the new datasets submitted to DataShare, our open-access data repository. One of the first datasets that gripped me was; Debates on slavery and abolition held by student debating societies at the University of Edinburgh, 1765-1870.

This dataset is really cool because as well as being a valuable resource for future research projects, it’s extremely interesting to read, even as someone who doesn’t know anything about historical research. This readability is what makes humanities dataset submissions so fun to process.

This dataset summarises debates on chattel slavery and abolition by two of the University’s debating societies during roughly the last hundred official years of the Transatlantic slave trade. It includes motions and outcomes of the debates, as well as information about the people participating and the positions they took.

It’s easy to tell ourselves that people in the past caused unimaginable harm because they didn’t know any better. Maybe this impulse is a form of self-preservation, a way to deny our ancestors’ agency to protect them – and ourselves – from blame. The dataset reminds us that even at the height of the slave trade there were many people publicly voicing their opposition. The data give us some insight into how these men understood their own complicity in slavery and their responsibility in upholding or abolishing it.

It’s interesting to see, for example, that some debate outcomes were pro-abolition, but against immediate abolition. Or how a debate on whether it would be sound policy to abolish the African slave trade had a unanimously pro-abolition outcome in 1792, yet full emancipation didn’t come for over forty years.

A preview of ‘University of Edinburgh Dialectic Society debates on slavery and abolition, 1792-1870’. From Buck, Simon; Frith, Nicola; Curry, Tommy. (2024). Debates on slavery and abolition held by student debating societies at the University of Edinburgh, 1765-1870 [text]. University of Edinburgh. Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/7841.

The dataset comes from The Decolonised Transformations Project which aims to take a critical look at the University’s complicity and investment in slavery and colonialism, confront the legacies of these choices, and make concrete recommendations to address present-day structural racism. The project is a great example of how Humanities research can be translated into a wide array of resources to maximise its utility and reach. As well as traditional outputs like publications and reports, the research team has published datasets, done podcasts, and held workshops and talks for the wider community.

Decolonised Transformations – Confronting the University’s Legacies of Slavery and Colonialism

The datasets have been downloaded multiple times since they were shared in November, so I’m sure other people are finding this data as interesting as I am.

Evelyn Williams
Research Data Support Assistant

DataShare spotlight: Human MotionLess Dataset (HuMoLs) and the creative potential of research data

Posted on 28 January 2025 by kmunro

For the second installment of the spotlight on DataShare blog posts, I would like to showcase a fascinating item containing videos of people not doing anything!

The dataset in question is titled “Human MotionLess Dataset (HuMoLs)” and was created by researchers Longfei Chan, Muhammad Ahmed Raza and Robert Fisher, who are based in the School of Informatics’ Institute of Perception Action and Behaviour. While on the face of it, people being still might not seem very dynamic, the research behind this dataset is trying to solve a difficult problem with a very useful outcome. Simply put, how do you tell when someone is lying still because they are doing something like sleeping, or if it is because they are unwell or have fallen? The videos in this dataset aim to try and train healthcare monitoring systems to help determine whether it is the former or the latter of these possibilities, with the priority being to uncover any critical medical conditions or to analyse chronic conditions.

A selection of still images taken from the videos in the dataset.

What struck me while reviewing the videos for submission was that beyond the usefulness of these videos to the research project, there was the potential for them to be adapted creatively. The videos have a deliberately “uncanny valley” aspect, due to using AI to deepfake participant’s faces in order to preserve their anonymity. The amusingly odd character to the videos made me imagine them being used in an Adam Curtis documentary, or in an Aphex Twin music video. Possibly even in an Adam Curtis documentary with Aphex Twin music over the top of it.

This raises the fascinating idea that there are rich sources of research data stored in open access repositories that could have a life beyond being reproducible, but could also be reused, repurposed and remixed into creative new pieces, adding value to both the research itself, and to the repositories where the affiliated data is stored. To demonstrate this possibility, I have edited some of the videos together, see below, and set them to music. The piece of music, “Redolescence” by Other Lands, has a dreamlike quality to it which both complements and recontextualises the videos into something beyond their originally intended use.

What other audio and visual materials are there contained in research data repositories waiting to be repurposed in a creative manner? Time (and much more talented creators than me) will tell!

The full dataset can be found on DataShare: Human MotionLess Dataset (HuMoLs)

The paper which the dataset supports: OPPH: A Vision-Based Operator for Measuring Body Movements for Personal Healthcare

Permission to use the music featured in this video was kindly granted by Gavin Sutherland, performing here under his artist name of Other Lands. The album which contains this track can be purchased on Bandcamp: Other Lands – Riddle of the Mode

Knowledge Exchange with Japan

Posted on 21 January 2025 by Robin Rice

Two members of the Research Data Support team recently had an adventure visiting Japan in order to provide practical lessons to library students and librarians studying in a research data management (RDM) course.

When Professor Emi Ishita had visited the team in 2023, she was preparing a new syllabus for research data management for her library students at the Kyushu University iSchool. Struck by the strong engagement our team members had with researchers through training, supporting data management plans, and moderating data deposits, she returned in August, 2024 with a delegation of practicing librarians to learn from the Universities of Edinburgh, Leeds, and Oxford. The group spent a full day with various members of Library Research Support, going over a question list they had sent in advance, about Open Access (OA) and RDM support, and our approach to training researchers. Staff and visitors eating lunch

At the end of the session, Emi revealed that a grant was available to pay for two RDM practitioners from UoE to come to Kyushu University in Fukuoka to contribute to an October, 2024 public symposium and a two day-long in-person training sessions for her students. The students would include Masters students enrolled in the iSchool at Kyushu, as well as practicing librarians looking to reskill themselves following government policy directives embracing immediate open access and data sharing for research publications.

bento box The speakers for the hybrid symposium on OA and RDM in Japan were myself with Dr Simon Smith, along with long-time RDM service provider Jake Carlson from the University of Buffalo (New York), and the Library Director from Chiba University, and the Research Data Service Director at Kyushu University providing a Japanese context for OA and RDM. Dr Ishita introduced the symposium and chaired the panel session – her team also provided all the speakers with beautifully presented bento boxes tailored to each person’s diet for lunch.

While the symposium was exciting, with about 60 people in attendance and about 130 more watching and listening online, it was the practical training that myself and Simon found truly inspirational. The students overcame their customary reserve to answer Simon’s open-ended questions about supporting researchers with data management planning in a classroom setting. Later, they formed into small groups to try out depositing data in DataShare, and evaluate each other’s metadata for quality. The technology worked, the students were curious and engaged, and the Kyushu instructors were pleased with the outcome.

library trainers at Kyushu University, Oct 2024

Japanese hospitality lunch During the week of the event, Simon and I visited prior and new contacts at Tokyo University, Chiba University, Kyoto University, Nagoya University and NII. In addition to the excellent company, we were pleased to be visiting such a beautiful country and eating the wonderful food.

NII staff outside restaurant

Mount Aso volcano

Edinburgh Research Data Blog