The principle of open repository persistence is a topic of growing concern within open research, and within the management of digital libraries and archives more generally. This dataset combines data about European repositories from several repository registries and web scraped sources, including the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, thereby creating a unique dataset of historic repository locations and their OAI-PMH endpoints. Included are data denoting the status of these repositories based on their HTTP(S) responses, enabling identification of impersistent repositories. Also included are text mined data presenting the extent to which impersistent European repository content has permeated the scholarly record. This data are mined using CORE (https://core.ac.uk/), a vast corpus of scholarly outputs. It provides summary data on scholarly works found to cite or reference impersistent repository content, including basic bibliographic data of these scholarly works, the impersistent repository content they cite, when they were cited, as well as data on the 'date of decease' of known impersistent repositories within the dataset. Our dataset makes possible several observations about the nature of impersistent repositories, their profile, and their decay rate. It contributes to an improved understanding of a threat to the digital scholarly record which exists through scholarly infrastructure that is otherwise perceived to be persistent. This dataset accompanies a forthcoming research article but underlying data are of possible analytical interest to others exploring the challenges of 'reference rot' and/or 'link rot'.