About BioWeb.me

Why this exists

Scientific web tools are usually hosted at a university or institute, which means long, forgettable URLs that nobody can be expected to type, let alone remember. Worse, those URLs rarely stay put. When a server is migrated or the researcher who built the tool moves on, the link breaks, and every paper, bookmark, and downstream tool pointing at it breaks too.

This is well documented. Jonathan Wren's studies of URLs in MEDLINE abstracts showed widespread link decay over just a few years (Wren JD, 2004, Bioinformatics 20:668–672, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btg465; follow-up Wren JD, 2008, Bioinformatics 24:1381–1385, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn127). Our own analysis of the NAR Web Server Issue dataset found that 47% of services published in 2003 were no longer reachable at their original URL (Schultheiss et al., 2011, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024914).

What we do about it

BioWeb.me lets you create a short, memorable, persistent link to your web resource. When the underlying server changes, you update the destination once and every link you have ever published keeps working. No dead citations, no lost users.

Registered users can edit and delete their links and their targets, and view redirect statistics. Register here to get started.

Who built it

BioWeb.me was developed by researchers originally in the MLB Research Group at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society in Tübingen, Germany. It is offered as a free, non-commercial service to the research community.

If you want to build web tools that last, we also wrote up ten simple rules for the whole life cycle of a web service, and a long-term score you can use to assess your own.