Dear all,
I posted this message to the UK based lis-medical list and it has been suggested it might be of interest here too. [*see note below]
Colleagues and I are watching closely the effects the actions of the President of the USA on the availability of health and other scientific information. Events at the NLM and at the National Network of Libraries of Medicine seem to be affected too. Pages and data are being removed if they don’t reflect the views of the new administration. This is, I think, an assault on our profession as well as on the availability of health information, and here is where we are finding things out:
[1] The US based MEDLIB-L email list, archive at https://list.uvm.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=MEDLIB-L, information about the list and how to join at https://www.mlanet.org/communities/medlib-l/.
[2] On Bluesky (which I am quite new to):
- Searching #medlibs
- The AltGov feed https://bsky.app/profile/larry.earth/feed/alt_gov. The information for this says “Posts from vetted current and former government workers in the AltGov starter pack [go.bsky.app/FLUwv5d] who generously share their perspectives about how the regime is impacting critical agencies.”
- https://bsky.app/profile/altcdc.bsky.social. There seem to be “alt” profiles for other US federal agencies too.
[3] Stat News, https://www.statnews.com/
[4] From MEDLIB-L I learned of:
- https://journalistsresource.org/home/as-the-us-government-removes-health..., a list of “non-government websites with health databases”
- https://lil.law.harvard.edu/blog/2025/01/30/preserving-public-u-s-federa..., a data vault.
[5] We have found some US university sites which are linking to information about what is happening and to groups who are performing “data rescue” (which does seem to be an issue every time the administration changes):
- https://libguides.umn.edu/govpubs/admin
- https://subjectguides.library.american.edu/data_rescue
- https://researchguides.library.syr.edu/data
- https://climate.law.columbia.edu/Silencing-Science-Tracker
[6] Lastly a PubMed search for trump[ti] finds news items in Nature, the BMJ and other places.
Best wishes,
Keith
Keith Nockels MA (Hons), Dip. Lib., FHEA, MCLIP (revalidated 2023)
(he/his/him) (hear my name)
Academic Librarian (Healthcare, Medicine, Clinical Sciences)
Division of Library and Learning Services | University of Leicester | UK
E: khn5@le.ac.uk | T (via Teams): +44 (0)116 229 7446
Chat (Teams): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/0?users=khn5@leicester.ac.uk
HIFA profile: Keith Nockels is an Academic Librarian at the University of Leicester, Clinical Sciences Library, Leicester Royal Infirmary, UK. The library has a link with the medical library at the University of Gondar (formerly Gondar College of Medical Sciences), Ethiopia. khn5 AT le.ac.uk
[*Note from HIFA moderator (NPW): Thank you Keith, this is really helpful. I have replaced bullets with numbers [1], [2] etc for ease of reading in plain text]