Web Cite - History

History

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 web content begun to be archived by Internet Archive, only WebCite allows for "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.

WebCite used to be, but is no longer, a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. In a 2012 message on Twitter, Eysenbach commented that "WebCite has no funding, and IIPC charges 4000 Euro/yr in membership fees."

WebCite "feeds its content" to other digital preservation projects, including the Internet Archive. Lawrence Lessig, an American academic who writes extensively on copyright and technology, used WebCite in his amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court case of MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.