RLUK’s Digital Shift Forum brings together colleagues from across the information, research, cultural and heritage communities, and third and commercial sectors, to discuss the future of the digital shift in collections, services, and audiences.
The series aims to promote cross-sector discussion and debate, to enable knowledge exchange, and inspire collaborative endeavour across sectors and communities, for the benefit of RLUK members and the wider research and information management communities.
The Digital Shift Forum is open to all, and you do not need to belong to an RLUK member institution to attend or participate.
The persistence challenge: Ensuring long-term access to repositories
Wednesday 28 October, 14:00 – 15:00 (GMT), 15:00 – 16:00 (CET), 16:00 – 17:00 (EET/SAST), 07:00 – 08:00 (PDT), 10:00 – 11:00 (EDT), 22:00 – 23:00 (AWST/CST)
Digital repositories play a vital role in preserving and sharing research, but what happens when they disappear? In this RLUK Digital Shift session, we will review the outcomes of a larger study exploring the long-term survival of European repositories and the consequences when they can no longer be accessed. By combining data from repository registries, web archives, and CORE’s vast corpus of research publications, our study traced the history of thousands of repositories and examined how often their content continued to be cited after it had vanished. The findings raise important questions about the long-term reliability of the scholarly record and the organisational management of repository infrastructure.
The session will also discuss possible causes of repository decline and outline policy interventions that could help ensure research remains accessible into the future.
It will draw on the published paper: Macgregor, G. and Davidson, J. (2026) ‘Examining persistence of European open repository infrastructure and its diffusion in the scholarly record’, International Journal of Digital Curation, 20(1), pp. 1–31. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v20i1.1116