WebCite
 |
|
| Available in | English |
|---|---|
| Owner | University of Toronto |
| Created by | Gunther Eysenbach |
| Slogan(s) | Preserving for posterity |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 98,187 (August 2015[update]) |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | 1997 |
| Current status | Online |
The service differs from the short time Google Cache copies by having indefinite archiving and by offering on-the-fly archiving. The Internet Archive, since 2013, also offers immediate archiving, however WebCite has some advantages:
WebCite is a non-profit consortium supported by publishers and editors, and it can be used by individuals without charge. Rather than relying on a web crawler which archives pages in a "random" fashion, authors who want to cite web pages in a scholarly article can initiate the archiving process. They then cite – instead of or in addition to the original URL – the snapshot address archived by WebCite, with an identifier that specifies the cited source. (However, note that the Internet Archive does both a crawler-based archiving and on-demand archiving.)
WebCite can be used to preserve cited Internet content, such as the archived web pages, in addition to citing the original URL of the Internet content. All types of web content, including HTML web pages, PDF files, style sheets, JavaScript and digital images can be preserved. It also archives metadata about the collected resources such as access time, MIME type, and content length.
Conceived in 1997 by Gunther Eysenbach, WebCite was publicly described the following year when an article on Internet quality control declared that such a service could also measure the citation impact of web pages. In the next year, a pilot service was set up at the address webcite.net (see archived screenshots of that service at the Wayback Machine (archived February 3, 1999)). Although it seemed that the need for WebCite decreased when Google's short term copies of web pages begun to be offered by Google Cache and the Internet Archive expanded their crawling (which started in 1996), WebCite was the only one allowing "on-demand" archiving by users. WebCite also offers interfaces to scholarly journals and publishers to automate the archiving of cited links. By 2008, over 200 journals had begun routinely using WebCite.
...
Wikipedia