Author: Martin Monperrus
Hypertext is great in scientific papers, it enables to anchor the paper in a wide web of online references, in order to point to posts, websites, data items, documentation pages that would not be appropriate as formal citation in the bibliography.
To add links in a paper, one has the following requirements:
Today, many papers use off-the-shelf URL shorteners such as bit.ly or tinyurl.com. This satisfies R1, R2 and R3. The problem is that it does not comply with R4. If a malicious person takes control over the bit.ly domain name, or if a catastrophe wipes out the mapping behind tinyurl.com (or any other shortening service), it means that the scientific web of links gets broken.
l.4open.science is a URL shortener by the scientific community, for the scientific community which addresses all requirements. Since we have full control over the domain name and the data, we guarantee long-term durability of the shortened URLs researchers, we guarantee that the short redirection URLs we put in papers will last for ever.
How to add a redirection? Create a pull-request with a new file say 11.html containing the redirection code:
<html><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL='https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11'"/></html>
In this case, this means that http://l.4open.science/11 redirects to https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11.
How to update a redirection? Create a pull-request to update the file 11.html, eg update 11.html
.html so that http://l.4open.science/11 is served with the proper content-typel.4open.science is hosted on Github Pages and Github Pages does not support HTTP redirections.