Abstract: Harvesting tasks gather information to a central repository. We studied 880560 harvesting tasks from 3446 harvesting services in 354 harvesting rounds during a period of 15 months, of which 382705 failed and the remaining tasks occasionally returning fewer records. A significant part of the Open Archive Initiative harvesting services never worked or have ceased working while many other services fail occasionally. A harvesting task includes many stages of information exchange, and each one of them may fail - but with different consequences each ...
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