Notice
eScholarship is experiencing ongoing, unscheduled, intermittent outages that will occasionally prevent users from accessing the eScholarship.org website and associated submission management systems (API, OAI-PMH, and other external access may also be affected). Our teams are actively monitoring the situation and addressing problems as they arise.
Root Cause
Like nearly all websites that contain information perceived as valuable by Large Language Models (LLMs), eScholarship is being scraped by Artificial Intelligence "bots" (see links below for more information). These bots are often rogue AI models that attempt to bypass security measures our team has implemented to improve eScholarship's reliability and uptime. Scrapers cause traffic spikes ("bot swarms") that can result in an entire month's worth of usual traffic hitting our server in a matter of seconds. The result is unpredictable and sometimes causes the eScholarship service to shut down.
Expected Outcome
When bot swarms happen, our technical team is alerted and new counter-measures are put in place to address the problem and bring the site back online. Unfortunately, each attack is new and unique, so it sometimes takes the team a significant amount of time to investigate the problem before applying a fix. In some instances, we may also proactively take the site down to contain our hosting costs, inline with our responsibility to steward University resources.
While there is currently no permanent solution to these occasional outages, our team is monitoring the site carefully and constantly investigating and applying the latest strategies for improving eScholarship's reliability.
What You Can Do
In some cases, simply reloading the eScholarship site will resolve issues you encounter. In other instances you may need to wait several minutes before attempting to access the page again. You may also encounter situations where you are asked to verify you are human before continuing on to the site.
We apologize for the inconvenience this ongoing situation causes and we appreciate your patience and understanding as we work to address the issue.
See also
- Library Journal: "AI Bots Swarm Library, Cultural Heritage Sites, Causing Slowdowns and Crashes"
- Museums Association: "AI scraper bots are disrupting online collections, report finds"