Backing Up US Federal Databases
Posted by John Baez
I hope you’ve read the news:
- Ethan Singer, Thousands of U.S. government web pages have been taken down since Friday, New York Times, 2 Feburary 2025.
Many of the pages taken down mention DEI, but they also include research papers on optics, chemistry, medicine and much more. They may reappear, but at this time nobody knows.
If you want to help save US federal web pages and databases, here are some things to do.
First check to see if they’re already backed up. You can go to the Wayback Machine and type a website’s URL into the search bar. Also check out the Safeguarding Research Discourse Group, which has a list of what’s been backed up.
If they’re not already on the Wayback Machine, you can save web pages there. The easiest way to do this is by installing the Wayback Machine extension for your browser. The add-ons and extensions are listed on the left-hand panel of the website’s homepage.
If you’re concerned that certain websites or web pages may be removed, you can suggest federal websites and content that end in .gov, .mil and .com to the End of Term Web Archive.
You can suggest federal climate and environmental databases to Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.
You can suggest databases to The Data Liberation Project.
You can suggest databases and also report databases you’ve backed up to the Safeguarding Research Discourse Group. This seems to be a community devoted to such issues.
For Centers for Disease Control data: tell science journalist Maggie Koerth which CDC data you’ve downloaded and whether you’ve made them publicly available.
I’ve taken these suggestions from Naseem Miller and added a bit. As you can see, there are overlapping efforts that are not yet coordinated with each other. This has some advantages (for example the Safeguarding Research Discourse Group is based outside the US) and some disadvantages (it’s hard to tell definitively what hasn’t been backed up yet).
For more on the situation, go here:
Naseem Miller, Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before they disappear from government websites, The Journalist’s Resource, 31 January 2025.
Library Innovation Lab Team, Preserving public U.S. federal data, 30 January 2025.
Re: Backing Up US Federal Databases
A little bit off topic, but do we know how well protected the arXiv is against the whims of the US government?
Donkeys’ years ago, there were arXiv mirrors all over the world, and one was encouraged to use the nearest one. Is the full arXiv repository still stored in multiple countries?
It would obviously be a disaster if something happened to the arXiv. I’d imagine that those who run it have been wise enough to protect themselves against possible legal as well as technological threats. But given how worried people seem to be about PubMed, it can’t be taken as a given.