Scientific Data Under Threat in Today’s America
Session Abstract
A brief look at how scientific data came under political pressure during the presidency of Donald Trump, and how scientists and data repositories in Europe worked to protect public access to evidence-based research, ensuring access for data science in a well-structured way.
Session Description
What happens when the data that is used by climate research, public health, and civil rights enforcement becomes politically inconvenient? This talk examines the vulnerability of scientific data during the presidency of Donald Trump, a period marked by the removal of government web pages, restrictions on agency communications, and proposed budget cuts to research institutions.
The talk highlights the role of PANGAEA – Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science in ensuring long-term preservation and open access to geoscientific datasets, demonstrating how trusted repositories can safeguard publicly funded research and make it globally accessible despite shifting political climates. By assigning persistent identifiers (DOIs), rich metadata, use of terminologies, standardized formats, and open licenses, data gets FAIR — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable — and readily integrable into computational and AI workflows, enabling large-scale analysis, machine learning applications, and reproducible science across disciplines.
