4.5 years ago by
Aberdeen, UK
The persistence (or lack of) bioinformatics resources online has been analysed a number of times:
"On the persistence of supplementary resources in biomedical publications" http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/7/260
"A survey of the availability of primary bioinformatics web resources" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1672022907600175
"404 not found: the stability and persistence of URLs published in MEDLINE" http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/20/5/668.abstract
"Persistence and Availability of Web Services in Computational Biology" http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0024914
"A Survey of the Availability of Primary Bioinformatics Web Resources" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1672022907600175
And sadly you have fallen foul of a resource that has either moved (with no redirect), been deprecated, or the server in the server room has died, and the one person who knew how to maintain the resource left the lab 3 years ago.
Reliance on sources that you cannot download and archive yourself, or are hosted outside of institutional repositories, or specific data repositories such as Figshare is asking for trouble. You will probably need to alter the paper to reflect data from a similar resource or attempt to contact the authors of the original paper. Or share some of the URLs above with your reviewer.
Can you post a link so we can check?