In this paper, we suggest adjustments to best practices for persistent web referencing; adjustments that aim at preservation and long time accessibility of web referenced resources in general, but with focus on web references in web archives.
Web referencing is highly relevant and crucial for various research fields, since an increasing number of references point to resources that only exist on the web. However, present practices using URL and date reference cannot be regarded as persistent due to the volatile nature of the Internet, - and present practices for references to web archives only refer to archive URLs which depends on the web archives access implementations.
A major part of the suggested adjustments is a new web reference standard for archived web references (called wPID), which is a supplement to the current practices. The purpose of the standard is to support general, global, sustainable, humanly readable and technology agnostic persistent web references that are not sufficiently covered by existing practices. Furthermore, it can support better practices for precise references in spite of the temporality issues for web material as well as issues related to closed web archives.
In order to explain needed change of practices based on the wPID, the paper includes a thorough description of the challenges in web references. This description is based on the perspectives from computer science, web collection and Digital Humanities.

Research and Development (R&D) websites often provide valuable and unique information such as software used in experiments, test data sets, gray literature, news or dissemination materials. However, these sites frequently become inactive after the project ends. For instance, only 7% of the project URLs for the FP4 work programme (1994-1998) were still active in 2015. This study describes a pragmatic methodology that enables the automatic identification and preservation of R&D project websites. It combines open data sets with free search services so that it can be immediately applied even in contexts with very limited resources available. The “CORDIS EU research projects under FP7 dataset” provides information about R&D projects funded by the European Union during the FP7 work programme. It is publicly available at the European Union Open Data Portal. However, this dataset is incomplete regarding the project URL information. We applied our proposed methodology to the FP7 dataset and improved the completeness of the FP7 dataset by 86.6% regarding the project URLs information. Using these 20 429 new project URLs as starting point, we collected and preserved 10 449 947 Web files, fulfilling a total of 1.4 TB of information related to R&D activities. All the outputs from this study are publicly available [16], including the CORDIS dataset updated with our newly found project URLs.