Ending Law Review Link Rot: A Plea for Adopting DOI

As librarians, we do a fair amount of research online for ourselves and the faculty and students we serve. As researchers, we know that there is nothing more frustrating than encountering a dead link to a much-needed article, particularly when there are deadlines to meet. Dead links (link/ reference rot) can be a particularly frequent occurrence for law review articles because the law review societies that publish them have not yet adopted standards for preserving online access to them, particularly the adoption of a standard for implementing persistent URLs. This Practical Insight is a plea to law reviews and law librarians who manage law review content to adopt the DOI, or Digital Object Identifier standard. A brief description of DOI will be provided, followed by instructions for minting a DOI and integrating DOI URLs into the metadata record of a law review article