About BioWeb.me

When scientific web resources are hosted at a university or research institute, this often results in long, unintuitive URLs that users can't possibly be asked to remember. Over time, the URL of the service will change if the web server is moved or the researcher that created the service switches positions. This has been shown by Jonathan Wren in his studies of MEDLINE abstract URLs (Wren JD (2004) 404 not found: the stability and persistence of URLs published in MEDLINE. Bioinformatics 20, 668-672. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btg465, follow-up: Wren JD (2008) URL decay in MEDLINE-a 4-year follow-up study. Bioinformatics 24(11): 1381-1385. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn127), and in a study by Schultheiss et al. (2011) of the NAR Web Server Issue dataset. We observed that 47% of services published in the NAR Web Server Issue 2003 were no longer available at the published URL.

To improve this situation, we have created BioWeb.me, where you can create a short, memorable, persistent link to your web resource. Once the address of the web server changes, you can simply update the destination of your BioWeb.me link.

In order to use the destination update function, please register here.