What happened with miRecords mirna database website ?

Question

[makaonte]

What happened with miRecords mirna database website? The webpage is not available and I used it's data as part of an analysis in my paper. Now the reviewer can't see the page and asks for an explanation.

Edit:

Sorry, I forgot to post the link. The miRecords was suppose to be available at http://miRecords.umn.edu/miRecords.

[Neilfws]

Can you post a link so we can check?

Answer 1

[User 59]

The persistence (or lack of) bioinformatics resources online has been analysed a number of times:

• On the persistence of supplementary resources in biomedical publications
• A survey of the availability of primary bioinformatics web resources
• 404 not found: the stability and persistence of URLs published in MEDLINE
• Persistence and Availability of Web Services in Computational Biology
• A Survey of the Availability of Primary Bioinformatics Web Resources

And sadly you have fallen foul of a resource that has either moved (with no redirect), been deprecated, or the server in the server room has died, and the one person who knew how to maintain the resource left the lab 3 years ago.

Reliance on sources that you cannot download and archive yourself, or are hosted outside of institutional repositories, or specific data repositories such as Figshare is asking for trouble. You will probably need to alter the paper to reflect data from a similar resource or attempt to contact the authors of the original paper. Or share some of the URLs above with your reviewer.

Answer 2

[Mary]

I have left a comment on the PubMed site, and invited the team to please comment. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18996891

[makaonte]

Thank you for doing that, I am not a member of Pubmed Commons. I send a email to the first author and to the last author.

Answer 3

[Chris Evelo]

http://mirecords.umn.edu/miRecords/ works fine for me at this moment. It may just have been a hiccup.

[Neilfws]

me too as of right now

[makaonte]

It seems to be more than a hip-cup, because some months ago a reviewer of my paper could not access the site. But by now it is working again. Thanks

Answer 4

[mickael.leclercq]

Since at least one week the original website is down again apparently...

I also really need to access their data!

After some research I have found a mirror: http://c1.accurascience.com/miRecords/index.php

I sent an email to the corresponding author 4 days ago and also the first author but still no answers.