Consider this paper that was recently published in the journal Bioinformatics, and which showed up today in my RSS feed:

LICRE: unsupervised feature correlation reduction for lipidomics

Presumably it is a typo when the journal says that it was received on November 14th 2014:

I'll assume that this is meant to be 2013! The paper first appeared online on June 13th 2014, just 103 days ago. The text of this paper links to some software that should be available at http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/∼gwong/LICRE. Except that this URL doesn't work. Neither does http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/∼gwong/. Only when I visit http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/ do I discover the following:

The new website for the merged departments says that the merger happened in 2012, and this is confirmed by the redirection page which has a date of 18th January 2012. It is also confirmed by looking at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine which shows that the redirection page has been in place since at least February 2012.

All of which suggests that the software link in the paper may have not even worked properly at the time they submitted the manuscript. I'm sure there are other similar examples of speedy link rot, but this seems particularly striking. Especially since a search for 'LICRE' on the new website doesn't return any hits (nor can I find any mention of it on Google or various search engine caches).

I will contact the lead author to let him know about the disappearance of the software. In the meantime, I'll remind people of this previous post of mine:

5 things to consider when publishing links to academic websites

Update 2014-09-24 19.52: I heard back from the author, the LICRE code is now at https://sites.google.com/site/licrerepository/