Report: “Germany’s Plan for an Open and Independent PubMed Safety Net”

From an Absolutely Maybe Blog Post by Hilda Bastian:

A few months ago, I wrote about reasons to be concerned about the reliability of PubMed under the new regime at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubMed is a critical biomedical literature database, with a range of associated services.

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Now, Germany has stepped up to this challenge. On May 2, the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED), announced they were planning to develop an “open, reliable, and sustainable” alternative to PubMed. And today they held an open virtual meeting to discuss their plans for “resilient and independent life science research infrastructure.”

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Plan A is to re-create the current model of publisher-submitted data, including abstracts. Plan B is a fallback to using CrossRef meta-data, which is available for about 90% of what currently feeds into PubMed. In their 18-month building process, they are working on both. ZB MED is clearly very sensitive to the community concern about being suddenly left high and dry: They are moving as quickly as they can to have an emergency substitute as soon as possible, even though that would of necessity be a very no-frills, basic service.

Learn More, Read the Complete Post (1005 words)

See Also: Additional Details About the Project are Available in this May 5, 2025 Release: “Infrastructure Made in Europe” (via ZBMed)

Filed under: Data Files, Libraries, National Libraries, News, Publishing