U.S. Hosted Repositories and Datasets

[June 2025] Recent political developments in the United States have led to the restriction or removal of access to several datasets hosted on U.S. government platforms. Since early 2025, thousands of datasets—particularly in the fields of public health, climate research, and environmental monitoring—have been taken offline or are under threat of deletion. Institutions like the NIH, NOAA, EPA, and CDC have been impacted, raising concerns about long-term data accessibility.
To date, EPFL researchers have not reported any disruptions. However, to mitigate potential disruptions and promote sustainable data management, we encourage the following best practices:

  • Critically evaluate your choice of data repositories.
  • Use repositories based in regions with transparent governance: avoid platforms without guarantees of long-term service continuity or clear governance models.
  • Maintain regular backups of your data in multiple locations and formats.
  • Periodically verify your access to hosted data and plan alternative access routes if needed.
  • Ensure long-term accessibility of research-critical datasets, especially those required for reproducibility.
  • Archive your source code in a long-term, trustworthy archive, such as Software Heritage, to preserve the integrity of your research outputs.
  • Start or take part in conversations about the resilience of common (open science) resources that are important to your research. It is appropriate to ask that critical repositories do not depend on a single entity (e.g. live replication of data on multiple servers, open-source code, etc.)

While these steps are advisable for all data, they are particularly relevant for sensitive datasets, such as those in clinical or environmental domains.

For any questions or advice regarding your data storage strategy, please contact the EPFL Library Research Data team: [email protected].

For questions on controlled-access datasets hosted by the U.S. Government, contact the Research Office: [email protected].

Potentially impacted repositories for EPFL researchers (non-exhaustive) [June 2025]

Further reading and resources

Contact

[email protected]

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