It appears that the Venezuelan Scielo at www. scielo.org.ve/ is now just ve. scielo.org/ DuckDuckGo still indexes the old URL, which it seems no longer works. I get a pass-through to the Wayback Machine at Archive.org on hitting such dead URLs, though that’s the result of my browser plugin.

Google Search is indexing the new URL only, which works. When Google Search changes, it’s usually a sign that the old URL really is kaput.

It’s probably best to keep an eye on the other Scielo aggregators, to see if they make the same change and thus break older URL paths and Web links. They don’t appear to have made such a change, so far.

My guess would be that the .ve change could be a result of buying one of those ‘vanity’ fixes which remove the www. in an URL. After some hard-sell from a salesman such fixes usually turn out to be very expensive to maintain, and after a time the URL often defaults back to normal.

In the meantime JURN is also directly indexing Venezuela’s journals at produccioncientificaluz.org and saber.ucv.ve/ojs/ and erevistas.saber.ula.ve. The nation is starving, but their journals are still online and reachable for now. The latter two appear to have different sets of journals, despite being from the same University of the Andes.