Hilda Bastian on the Absolutely Maybe blog at PLOS updated her previous post about the possible enshitification of PubMed by the current political regime in the US, and the need for a backup plan. It looks like Germany is taking the lead ...
A few months ago, I wrote about reasons to be concerned about the reliability of PubMed under the new regime at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubMed is a critical biomedical literature database, with a range of associated services. It’s produced by one of the institutes of the NIH, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). I listed several questions: Could PubMed go down more often, and for longer? Might services no longer be free? How else could the quality and reliability of its services be degraded? Could junk science flood flood in, if (when?) the NLM is no longer a reliable gatekeeper?
If there are only short-term service delivery problems, we will be fine using Europe PMC – but we would need more than that if PubMed was severely affected. (You can read more about this and some of the technical issues I discuss below in my earlier post.)
Now, Germany has stepped up to this challenge. On May 2, the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED), announced they were planning to develop an “open, reliable, and sustainable” alternative to PubMed. And today they held an open virtual meeting to discuss their plans for “resilient and independent life science research infrastructure.”
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