from the spread-knowledge-openly dept
A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about a growing risk that we will lose access to the world’s knowledge, because of a failure by traditional academic publishers to place copies of the articles they publish in key backup archives. Although unacceptable, that oversight is more a matter of laziness and cost cutting on the part of publishers, rather than a result of outright animosity to the preservation of academic learning.
Indeed, if anyone a year ago had suggested that a far more serious assault on knowledge might take place, one that was a conscious and thoroughgoing attempt to expunge hard-won facts from the record, it would have rightly been ridiculed as too absurd a notion even to consider. And yet that is precisely what Donald Trump has been engaged in since coming to power. The fact that the unthinkable is happening has important consequences not just for learning, but also for academic publishing. The first signs of what was to come appeared in February. The Guardian reported:
Donald Trump’s administration has started to remove or downgrade mentions of the climate crisis across the US government, with the websites of several major departments pulling down references to anything related to the climate crisis.
After expunging words, the Trump administration moved on to wiping out entire databases. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration quietly announced that it would be deleting key datasets relating to marine and climate science. Environmental and science groups are now suing the US government for removing public information in this way.
The Internet Archive has already brought together together more than 700 collections from over 50 government organizations as part of its “Democracy’s Library,“ and now groups in Europe are joining in with their own projects to preserve holdings. Pangaea is a “data publisher for earth and environmental science,” hosted by the University of Bremen, in Germany. When the imminent deletions of US data were discovered, Pangaea announced the “PANGAEA Data Rescue Initiative 2025”:
Starting in 2025, the United States is facing unprecedented budget cuts to federal science agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). These cuts specifically target climate research, environmental monitoring, and public health data programs, with plans to significantly reduce funding for data services and websites.
In response, members of the scientific community—both within and outside the U.S.—approached PANGAEA to help preserve critical data products that were at immediate risk of being decommissioned. This includes the potential loss of data availability and the shutdown of data portals, which would make it much harder to locate and access existing datasets.
Consequently, PANGAEA has started data rescue efforts in agreement with the respective data providers by following the FAIR data principles.
FAIR requires data to meet principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. One reason why Pangaea’s data rescue initiative can take place is that works of the US government are not covered by domestic copyright law. This means that copies can be freely made. The Knowledge Commons hopes to make backups of vital research on an even larger scale, and has applied for a grant from the Trust in American Institutions Challenge. That initiative is sponsored by Reid Hoffman, and will award a single $9 million grant over five years to the selected project. Knowledge Commons’ proposal includes an interesting approach to dealing with material that is under copyright:
we propose to build a novel technical architecture that preserves not only material to which we have a license (or is openly licensed), but also material that we do not hold a license for, by using PGP [Pretty Good Privacy] encryption to ensure that this material cannot be accessed until a valid copyright-expiring trigger-event has occurred.
Just as vital as key datasets are academic papers. Accessing the latter in the field of medicine is made easier thanks to PubMed, whose interesting origins are discussed at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). As Hilda Bastian wrote in February this year:
PubMed is incredibly reliable. And a lot depends on it. It’s an ecosystem built around MEDLINE, the steady feed of new publications in biomedicine: It determines which journals count, takes their output in, adds valuable information and linkages, and feeds it back out – free to users globally. And there’s a lot more, too, that we rely on from the NCBI (the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH’s National Library of Medicine [NLM]).
That article featured a troubling hypothetical: “What if We Can’t Rely on PubMed?” Two weeks later, PubMed did indeed go dark, apparently due to some temporary problem. But in the wake of Trump’s attack on science, people realized that PubMed was vulnerable and might be shut down permanently. As a result, the German Library of Medicine, ZB Med, launched an effort to create an open-source global literature infrastructure. Hilda Bastian explained the plan:
The big vision is to move past the reliance on any single country’s investment in this core life sciences infrastructure: It’s not to have a duplicative, parallel structure in Germany, nor to simply transplant a centralized system from the US to Germany. The goal is a fully open source, federated, safety net, embedded within the international community, with a strong global network of support. If PubMed as it is now falls, then this “PubMed 2.0” could carry the load forward. And if PubMed powers on, then aspects of what’s developed would be available for the NLM and any other services to use.
As Bastian’s post notes, one of the biggest problems with the idea is getting traditional publishers on board:
ZB MED has begun negotiations with publishers this month, and several gold Open Access publishers have already indicated their willingness to submit their meta-data to this project. In the Q&A part of the meeting, there was discussion about the challenge of getting commercial publisher participation. It’s going to take a lot to convince publishers to contribute, and getting the library/government consortia that pay for institutional subscriptions to include this in their contracts may be critical
Academic publishing is emerging as key battleground in this new assault on knowledge. Last month, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, threatened to ban government scientists from publishing in the top medical journals:
“We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Jama and those other journals, because they’re all corrupt,” the US health secretary said on the Ultimate Human podcast. He accused the publications of being controlled by pharmaceutical companies.
Although he’s right that pharmaceutical companies do wield too much power in this world, his solution is arguably worse:
Kennedy outlined plans to launch government-run journals that would become “the preeminent journals” because National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding would anoint researchers “as a good, legitimate scientist”.
Government-run titles publishing “approved” research from “good, legitimate” scientists is a recipe for disaster. It’s part of a broader plan by the Trump administration to control every aspect of federally-funded research. Last month, in yet another executive order, Trump pledged to restore “Gold Standard Science.” Although superficially a welcome move, leading scientists have warned that it will “destroy American science as we know it.” They brand it as “Fool’s-Gold Standard Science.”
All these moves to restrict access to knowledge make re-inventing academic publishing even more urgent. The big publishers will doubtless implement any demands that Trump makes in an effort to preserve their healthy profits. Those could include refusing to publish scientists that have fallen foul of the Trump administration by daring to raise objections to the new approach, or by pointing out the harm it will cause.
Smaller open access publishers might step in and provide a global platform for those who have been banned in this way. However, they too are subject to commercial pressures, and may not want to take on the Trump administration. This underlines once more the importance of diamond open access, where no charge is made either to the researchers writing the papers, or to readers. Because of the underlying business model, diamond open access journals tend to be run on a shoestring, supported by grants from independent foundations. That makes them largely immune to even Donald Trump at his most vindictive. As the US war on knowledge sharpens, we can probably expect to see diamond open access titles emerge as the samizdats of the digital age.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: academia, academic publishing, climate science, destruction of knowledge, knowledge, pubmed, rfk jr., science
