They've Finally Found A Way To Fix Every Single Dead Link On The Entire Internet

Elvert Barnes / Flickr, CC

This is simple but brilliant: Perma CC is a new service that allows authors to create web links that never lead to broken, dead, changed, or missing web pages ever again.

Here's how it works:

When a user creates a Perma.cc link, Perma.cc archives a copy of the referenced content, and generates a link to an unalterable hosted instance of the site. Regardless of what may happen to the original source, if the link is later published by a journal using the Perma.cc service, the archived version will always be available through the Perma.cc link.

Perma CC is currently focusing on academic publishing: While dead links are frustrating for the average user, they're a huge issue for legal and academic journals.

Authors use links to cite influential work a lot, but web pages are often temporary, fleeting things. Half of all the U.S. Supreme Court's citations of web links lead to dead ends, according to the New York Times.

A study cited in The Times Higher Education supplement says 98.3 per cent of all web pages are changed in some way within six months.