A replacement for PubMed

I live on PubMed. PubMed is a free database of life sciences and biomedical information from scientific papers, books, and more. As a health science journalist, I use it dozens of times in most weeks, hundreds when I’m actively working on some kinds of projects. For instance, actually checking the citations in a paper (crazy!) requires a lot of PubMed searches!

And PubMed is American, and it’s a science thing, and therefore it is seriously endangered. What are the odds that the insane new management at the NIH is going to want to keep paying for PubMed? Not only is there no guarantee it will survive the MAHA-pocalypse, it seems unlikely. Germany shares my concern so much that it is working on a replacement — and not just a German replacement for Germans. Hilda Bastian for PLoS:

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.

That is … quite ambitious. I can barely imagine the technical complexities, never mind the administrative and political wrangling required. But Bastian seems optimistic:

Having worked at PubMed, I have some idea of how complex “replacing” it would be. I was hopeful, but a little worried, to be honest. I need not have worried! What they’re doing is ambitious for sure, but it’s both responsible and exciting.

Excellent.