In 2007, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) shunted millions of dollars away from infrastructure grants, which supported widely used databases that house terabytes of biological data, and instead invest those resources in informatics research, Nature reported. As a result, at least five such databases are now facing serious funding shortages and are on the brink of being shuttered.
“The idea that this resource could just disappear is a serious problem for everyone who relies on it,” Mark Musen, a bioinformatician at Stanford University in California, and manager of one such database called Protégé, told Nature.
“As journals, we cannot host all the data that are part of the paper, and so if they disappear, it’s a big deal,” Inês Chen, chief editor at Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (NSMB) said in the same article.
But the databases are not going down without a fight from their user communities. ...
