By Daniel Gomes, Arquivo.pt – the Portuguese Web Archive

Although most current Research & Development (R&D) projects rely on their sites to publish valuable information about their activities and achievements, these sites and the information they provide typically disappear a few years after the end of the projects. Web archiving is a solution to this problem.

Why preserve websites of Research & Development projects?

During the FP7 work programme the European Union invested millions of EUROS on R&D projects. Scientific outputs from this significant investment were disseminated online through R&D project sites. Moreover, part of the funding was invested in the development of the project sites themselves.

Sites of R&D projects must be preserved because they:

• publish valuable scientific outputs;
• are highly transient, typically they vanish shortly after the project funding ends;
• constitute a trans-national, multi-lingual and cross-field set of historical web data for researchers (e.g. social scientists);
• are…