2025/12/19 by Albers, Miriam, Rebholz-Schuhmann, Dietrich, Förstner, Konrad U.
#European data sovereignty #Forschungsinfrastruktur #Informationsversorgung #Medicine and health #OLSPub #Open Science #Parallelinfrastruktur #PubMed #Resilienz #ZB MED #biomedical literature #biomedizinische Literatur #europäische Datensouveränität #information provision #open science #parallel infrastructure #research infrastructure #resilience
paper · doi:10.3205/mbi000633
The PubMed outage in March 2025 highlighted the critical dependency of global biomedical research on a single US-based infrastructure. With over 39 million entries and approximately 10 million daily search queries, PubMed is indispensable for research, clinical practice, and education. A prolonged outage would have severe consequences: systematic reviews would become impossible, clinical guidelines could not be updated, and resource-limited countries would be particularly affected. Existing alternatives such as Europe PMC, LIVIVO, or OpenAlex have limitations. The OLSPub project (Open Life Science Publications Database), initiated by ZB MED, aims to establish a complementary European parallel infrastructure based on open source and open data principles. Although the initial DFG application was not approved, ZB MED continues with a dual strategy: a revised funding application and parallel development of core components using internal resources. The initiative demonstrates that the European scientific community is ready to take responsibility for resilient research infrastructures.