Archiving at-risk public research data post-election

November 15, 2024 6:56 AM

I am worried, post-election, that a lot of research data (publicly available and otherwise) may be deleted, particularly if it supports human caused climate change, effectiveness of vaccines, sex/gender research and so on. Are there any concerted efforts to archive at-risk data elsewhere either in relatively-safe public institutions (eg CERN or University of California), or via some private institutions, perhaps in a distributed manner?

I don't think archive.org is really set up for this. I'm thinking of data from NOAA, NLM, NCBI and the like.

More generally, I'm wondering about backups for the backups. NCBI has been in my experience the gold standard for archiving data for, eg, sequencing data, but that may be an illusion.

posted by foonly to Science & Nature (7 answers total)

Response by poster: And, efforts that I can contribute to or participate in are a plus. I'm going to ask around to colleagues at the University of California and CalEPA as well, will post anything I get here...
posted by foonly at 7:05 AM on November 15, 2024

Environmental Data and Governance Initiative is described in Grist
posted by HearHere at 7:15 AM on November 15, 2024

Cornell has a Data & Reproduction Archive.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 8:22 AM on November 15, 2024

Response by poster: I did get a memail which I haven't replied to yet which brought up a very good point. If there are any archiving/data rescue operations underway that the participants don't want to draw attention to, of course don't publicly post them here. The ones mentioned so far are already established and out there. Thanks!
posted by foonly at 9:02 AM on November 15, 2024 [1 favorite]

UPenn's data refuge project did this under Trump I. I haven't heard what the plans are to get it back together -- but I would keep an eye on them. I will assume they will be asking for help shortly.
posted by pantarei70 at 12:59 PM on November 15, 2024

I would imagine non-American sites with servers not in the US would be safest?
posted by cotton dress sock at 8:21 PM on November 15, 2024

Scientists are frantically copying U.S. climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump (from 2016)
posted by caek at 7:28 AM on November 17, 2024