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Long-Term Accessibility of Software through Web Archives

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Long-Term Accessibility of Software through Web Archives
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22
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CC Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivatives 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production Year2017
Production PlaceHannover

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Abstract
Software is widely used and referenced in research and scientific publications. Hence, just like the results published in an article, associated software should be preserved and made long-term accessibly as well. Due to the nature of software and its dynamic aspects, this is rather challenging though. Very commonly, only related materials, such as a software's documentation, parts of its source code or change logs, are freely available. However, these can be very valuable to comprehend or reproduce experiments described in literature. We found that a big portion of this data is provided on the Web. Around 60% of the software webpages we analyzed link to documentation, while another 50% even contain some artifacts of the actual software [1, 2]. Web Archives are a way to preserve this information and allow for long-term accessibility, even if the software and corresponding information change. Although many of those websites are already archived, our study shows that the evolution of a software is not always well captured. Therefore, we are working towards a pro-active approach to archive software on the Web in the future as part of the scientific process. [1] Holzmann, H., Runnwerth, M., Sperber, W.: Linking Mathematical Software in Web Archives. 5th International Congress on Mathematical Software, ICMS 2016. Berlin, Germany (2016). [2] Holzmann, H., Sperber, W., Runnwerth, M.:?Archiving Software Surrogates on the Web for Future Reference.20th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries, TPDL 2016, Hannover, Germany(2016).