Kathleen Shearer
Executive Director
COAR
There are a growing number of artificial intelligence (AI) bots crawling repositories. These automated bots, or crawlers, navigate the internet, gathering data and indexing information for search engines, AI and large language models, and other purposes. While some bots are rather innocuous, others are sufficiently aggressive that they are increasingly causing service disruptions in repositories (and other scholarly communications infrastructures). To learn more about the current state and gain a better understanding about the impact of bots and crawlers on repositories, COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) distributed a survey to members in April 2025. The survey received 66 responses from repositories around the world (22 from Canada and US, 22 from Europe, 9 from Latin America, 6 from Asia, 4 from Australasia, 2 from Africa, and 1 unknown). Over 90% of survey respondents indicated their repository is encountering aggressive bots, usually more than once a week, and often leading to slow downs and service outages. This presentation provides a summary of the results of the survey and discussed next steps.
