Article by Jennifer Gibson and Kaitlin Thaney: “The global research enterprise relies on information infrastructure to power scientific discovery, medical breakthroughs, and evidence-based policymaking. But the data repositories, digital asset management services, and preservation systems that ensure research data remains open and accessible are often overlooked—until they disappear. Many of these tools and services are vulnerable to policy changes and funding cuts. Over the last 25 years, nearly 200 research data repositories have shut down permanently; more than half of those closures have happened since 2018.
Each closure represents lost knowledge and leads to broken links, bad citations, and a general inability to utilize and verify scientific findings. For example, without funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Alaska Earthquake Center has ceased providing real-time seismic data to inform tsunami warnings for the whole US West Coast. On topics as disparate as Gulf War illness or natural selection, when a repository goes dark, it can affect individuals or even entire research disciplines.
The data repositories, digital asset management services, and preservation systems that ensure research data remains open and accessible are often overlooked—until they disappear.
And because repositories and other open science infrastructures are commonly designed to support transboundary research, their collapse can have compounding global effects. In early 2025, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) suspended access to the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) Program databases, a repository containing decades of population, health, HIV, and nutrition data from more than 90 countries. Almost overnight, researchers in Malawi lost access to critical data informing antiretroviral therapy programs serving roughly one million HIV-positive patients; researchers in Nigeria had nowhere to store new data designed to identify causes of maternal deaths; and the release of complete data from a 2023–2024 key indicators survey in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was delayed for months. After USAID was dismantled in the first half of 2025, an emergency grant from the Gates Foundation restored access to existing DHS data and selected surveys. But this three-year support has not returned the program to its prior scale, leaving 23 countries with surveys still incomplete or unanalyzed…(More)”.
