Alberto Pepe included the date at which the URL availability was checked (dec 2011)  about 10 years ago

Commit id: 123d3bb8232f08e98c19def0b4094bcdcdb9c956

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2005. After 2005, the volume of total published links roughly stays  the same every year. The graph shows that with widespread use and  adoption of the Web, showing links to online resources within published  articles becoming more and more popular. During the second week of December 2011, we pinged every link in our corpus to establish  its availability.  The color of the  bars in the barplot of Figure \ref{fig:fig1} also depict depicts  whether published links were still available as of December 2011: the green portion of each bar represents  the volume of valid links (HTTP status code 200: OK), while the grey  portion of the bars represents broken links (HTTP status codes 3xx,