A snapshot of 3649 Web-based services published between 1994 and 2017 shows a decrease in availability after 2 years

摘要

BackgroundThe long-term availability of online Web services is of utmost importance to ensure reproducibility of analytical results. However, because of lack of maintenance following acceptance, many servers become unavailable after a short period of time. Our aim was to monitor the accessibility and the decay rate of published Web services as well as to determine the factors underlying trends changes.