Dealing With Bots: A COAR Resource for Repository Managers: Home

"In early 2025, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) conducted a survey in early 2025 to assess the extent to which repositories were being adversely affected by a sudden and large increase in activity by "bots" - automated Web clients such as crawling or harvesting systems. The ensuing report - The impact of AI bots and crawlers on open repositories: Results of a COAR survey, April 2025 - was published in June 2025. It makes clear that:

• the scale of traffic from badly-behaved bots presents a significant problem for open-access repositories
• the measures being taken by repositories vary in their effectiveness
• some of the measures being taken by repositories have unintended consequences of impeding access from legitimate users (both human and "machine")

In response to this, COAR convened the Dealing With Bots Task Group to develop advice and supporting information for repository managers to help them to deal with this phenomenon. This website is the primary output of the Task Group."