The Persistence Challenge: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Repositories

Digital repositories play a vital role in preserving and sharing research, but what happens when they disappear? In this RLUK Digital Shift session, the presenters will review the outcomes of a larger study exploring the long-term survival of European repositories and the consequences when they can no longer be accessed. By combining data from repository registries, web archives, and CORE's vast corpus of research publications, their study traced the history of thousands of repositories and examined how often their content continued to be cited after it had vanished. The findings raise important questions about the long-term reliability of the scholarly record and the organisational management of repository infrastructure. The session will also discuss possible causes of repository decline and outline policy interventions that could help ensure research remains accessible into the future. It will draw on their published paper Macgregor, G. and Davidson, J. (2026) ‘Examining persistence of European open repository infrastructure and its diffusion in the scholarly record’, International Journal of Digital Curation, 20(1), pp. 1–31. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v20i1.1116 Webinar available on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/JkE9EnN0jTA George Macgregor George Macgregor is currently ‘Assistant Director – Digital Library’, based within Information Services at the University of Glasgow. George works and leads on repository and digital library developments while also supporting activities within research discovery, open research, and digital scholarship. He has a PhD in Computer & Information Sciences, specializing in topics surrounding resource discovery. He is also a Wikipedian and an advocate of the knowledge commons. Prior to joining the University of Glasgow, George held academic and practitioner positions at several UK HEIs, including as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Digital Library Research, Senior Lecturer in Information Management & Systems at Liverpool John Moores University, and as Open Repository Manager & Technologist at the University of Strathclyde. Joy Davidson Joy Davidson is ‘Associate Director’ for the UK's Digital Curation Centre (DCC) - a research infrastructure that specialises in data management planning, curation and Open Science. Joy currently co-leads T8.3/T9.3/T10.3 in the European Commission (EC) funded FIDELIS project which focuses on strengthening repository staff capabilities for enabling FAIR and increasing the trustworthiness of their services. Joy previously led WP2 on engagement, adoption and implementation in the EC funded FAIR-IMPACT project (2022-2025) and previously led WP3 on policies and practices (2019-2022) for the EC funded FAIRsFAIR project. Both projects aimed to increase the production and use of FAIR data in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Joy has been involved in reviews for ESFRI roadmap updates and H2020 research infrastructure funding programmes.