COAR Survey on the impact of AI bots on repositories

"There are a growing number of AI bots crawling repositories and sometimes these bots are sufficiently aggressive that they can cause service disruptions and outages in repositories. As a result, some institutions have started to block machine access to their repositories, which is also inadvertently blocking other desired network services such as scholarly aggregators, indexing services, and directories.

In June 2025, COAR will launch a task force to better understand the current landscape of AI bots and repositories and develop recommended actions for repositories to allow them to remain open, while also protecting them against disruptive machine processes. To help inform the work of this task force, we invite COAR members to fill in this survey...."