PubMed, a free-to-use index of life-science articles, is maintained by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information.Credit: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
A temporary outage of the US government-funded PubMed database of biomedical literature over the weekend sent many researchers globally into a panic. Although the disruption does not seem to have been deliberate, and the service has since been restored, the episode highlights scientists’ reliance on the website and left many anguished about its future.
PubMed “is one of the primary platforms that health-care providers, researchers and students rely on to access peer-reviewed medical literature”, says Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious-diseases physician who studies global health in Dallas, Texas. The database, which indexes more than 37 million articles, is maintained by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), based in Bethesda, Maryland.
The NIH told Nature in an e-mail that, on 1 March “some of NIH public-web services experienced service disruptions” but all services were restored on 2 March. “NIH is committed to resilient and open access to PubMed and other NIH web services,” the team wrote.
But Kuppalli says any disruption — even if temporary — raises concerns about how researchers access essential scientific information. “It also serves as a reminder of the need for contingency plans, such as alternative repositories or offline access to critical research, to ensure that health-care providers and researchers are not left without crucial information when they need it most,” she says.
Although alternative databases exist, “PubMed stands out because it is a freely accessible, comprehensive and government-supported database that aggregates a vast amount of biomedical literature”, says Kuppalli.
Gone dark
On 1 March, some researchers noticed the site had stopped working. “Omg, did Pubmed go dark???” wrote Thanh Neville, a physician and pulmonology researcher at UCLA Health in Los Angeles, California, on the social-media platform Bluesky. “I hope and pray it comes back soon!” wrote Madhu Pai, a public-health researcher at McGill University in Canada.
Some researchers worried that the site had been taken down by US President Donald Trump’s administration. Over the past few weeks, content on several federal government websites has been withdrawn or modified in response to executive orders issued by the Trump administration.
But people in some locations could still access the site, says Bert Hubert, a software developer and co-founder of the software firm Power DNS, leading him to conclude that the site had not been intentionally shut down. “Then it would be really gone for everyone,” he says, as had happened with the US Agency for International Development website.
It’s still not clear what caused the problem, says Hubert. “There should be a very serious investigation into how this could have happened and why it took two days because this is worldwide critical infrastructure.”
