Deleting your blog : issues and terms

For one reason or another, you may want or need to stop publishing on your Hypotheses blog: end of your research programme, change of professional status, lack of time, evolution of your research…

However, this does not necessarily mean that you have to delete it. There are several scenarios and alternatives.

The first thing to note is that you cannot delete your blog yourself. You have to contact the Hypotheses team (hypotheses[at]openedition.org). If your blog is collective, make sure that all the administrators of your blog are in copy of your message.

First case: you have never published any posts, or very few, since the creation of your blog

You may have opened a research blog on Hypotheses and then realised that you could not contribute to it: the research project did not happen, you did not have the time or you wish to devote yourself to a completely different editorial project… Thus, your blog contains only a small number of posts and has never really been cited or referenced in search engines and databases.

You can request its deletion by writing to us at hypotheses[at]openedition.org. Please note that your blog will then be permanently deleted.

Second case: you have published a whole series of original posts, your blog may be listed in the OpenEdition catalogue and may have an e-ISSN

Do not delete your posts! Instead, contact the team to find out about the different options available. Indeed, your blog can remain inactive for an indefinite period.

One of the challenges of Hypotheses is to give access to your contents to the largest possible audience, while guaranteeing their durability. This durability requires short, easily quotable and above all unmodifiable URLs! If you delete your posts, and more broadly your blog, each citation of one of your posts in a blog, a journal, a book, a master or PhD thesis for example, will now be obsolete.

The probability of being cited somewhere increases with referencing in general search engines, such as Google, and specialized databases such as ISIDORE

Hypotheses blogs are listed in the OpenEdition catalogue and benefit from permanent identifiers with the attribution of DataCite DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers). They may eventually have an e-ISSN, assigned by the BnF for blogs produced on French territory.

This gives your publications greater visibility and significantly increases their referencing. Maintaining the durability of your blog also makes it possible to keep a history of the evolution of projects and, more broadly, the memory of research carried out in the humanities and social sciences. Moreover, this “inactive blog” status meets the principles of open science, by respecting the principles of FAIR data (so that data are easy to find, accessible, interoperable and reusable), which must now be taken into account as essential conditions in national and international calls for projects.

In addition to guaranteeing permanent access to your content, the fact of not deleting your blog will also have the advantage of giving you the opportunity to write again on your blog, if you wish.

Our recommendation: keep your blog online and be transparent about its inactivity

Even if inactive, a blog can remain online on Hypotheses, free of charge and without time limit. If a blog has not been updated for more than two years, it is automatically considered inactive, even if you do not request it. If your blog is listed in the OpenEdition catalogue, a mention “publication inactive since [date]” will be added to its bibliographical notice, in order to inform readers about the status of your publication.

In addition, it is a good practice to publish a final post explaining to your readers why you are no longer publishing in the blog, specifying, if you wish, the reasons for this choice, and indicating, if necessary, a link to the new space intended to host your future publications.

In any case, you remain the owner of the contents published on your Hypotheses blog. So, if you want to delete your blog, you just have to confirm your decision by writing to this address: hypotheses[at]openedition.org. We will then proceed to its final and irreversible deletion.

Featured image: Balled up paper – Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash : https://unsplash.com/photos/e4Davs7-XnE

---

---