WebCite
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.
Not to be confused with Website.Available in
No
1997
View historical archives only, no new archives
The site no longer accepts new archive requests; old archive snapshots can still be viewed.
Service features[edit]
WebCite allowed for preservation of all types of web content, including HTML web pages, PDF files, style sheets, JavaScript and digital images. It also archived metadata about the collected resources such as access time, MIME type, and content length.
WebCite was a non-profit consortium supported by publishers and editors, and it could be used by individuals without charge. 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[edit]
Conceived in 1997 by Gunther Eysenbach, WebCite was publicly described the following year when an article on Internet quality control declared that such a service could also measure the citation impact of web pages.[2] In the next year, a pilot service was set up at the address webcite.net. Although it seemed that the need for WebCite decreased when Google's short term copies of web pages began to be offered 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 digital preservation projects, including the Internet Archive.[1] Lawrence Lessig, an American academic who writes extensively on copyright and technology, used WebCite in his 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] In a further outage, between about October 29, 2021 and June 24, 2023, no archived content was available, only the main page worked.
Fundraising[edit]
WebCite ran a fund-raising campaign using FundRazr from January 2013 with a target of $22,500, a sum which its operators stated was needed to maintain and modernize the service beyond the end of 2013.[8] This includes relocating the service to 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[edit]
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]
