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@hildabast@mastodon.online

Post #882479

2025-02-14 06:04 UTC

Hate that it has come to this, but it's time to consider PubMed vulnerable to enshittification. My latest post @PLOS discusses the lines we need to fight to hold – and alternatives we can rely on internationally: https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/02/14/what-if-we-cant-rely-on-pubmed/ #medlibs

Replies (6)

  • @alexh@fediscience.org 2025-02-14 07:17

    @hildabast@mastodon.online @PLOS@mstdn.science Important analysis of how PubMed might be polluted by the new government anti-vaxxers, and some alternative journal databases we need to support, including @OpenAlex@mastodon.social

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  • @hildabast@mastodon.online @PLOS@mstdn.science Something I don't understand about NLM and PubMed is - can NLM "claw back" the publication metadata (including MeSH terms) it has already sent out to the wider ecosystem, which we can access via EuropePMC or Medline or Lens etc? Or is the worst-case scenario "merely" that new content would not be added (or that new low-quality content would be added)?

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  • @brembs@mastodon.social 2025-02-14 10:38

    @hildabast@mastodon.online @PLOS@mstdn.science Thank you so much for raising this! In my presentations on open infrastructures, for the last 10 or so years, I have been pointing towards all our databases resting on fickle ground, even the most stable of them all, the NCBI databases, e.g. slide 10 from 2014: https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/the-desolate-state-of-our-scientific-infrastructure/41995505#10 People only looked at me as if I was crazy. Why is it that it always seems to take a catastrophe before people realize the gravity of the situation?

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  • @colinsidre@piaille.fr 2025-02-14 12:03

    @hildabast@mastodon.online Thanks for this article. I work in a french health library and we still rely on the NLM for a lot of things, especially PubMed/Medline. I'll share this article with my colleagues!

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  • @hildabast@mastodon.online @PLOS@mstdn.science Thank you for the analysis and suggestions. I'll try using #EuropePMC.

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  • @hildabast@mastodon.online @PLOS@mstdn.science Adding to the concern that the US govt is not a reliable partner in maintaining the scholarly record: the CDC website content removals also encompassed published journal articles: https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2025/02/our-published-work-in-a-government-journal-curiously-disappeared/ See for yourself the Wayback Machine snapshots of error messages at the URL where a published article should be (green and orange circles on the calendar): https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2024/24_0121.htm #medlibs

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