"International science has proven itself astonishingly resilient in recent decades. It has survived political crises, pandemics, and geopolitical upheavals. Internationality has often evolved from an option to a necessity. But now science is facing an unprecedented test. The ultimate trigger is the US government's science policy, which is transforming American universities and thereby shaking not only the American science system but the foundations of global research cooperation as a whole. The completed, insinuated, or expected American withdrawals are only part of a larger picture. Governments around the world are flouting rules. Trust is being lost – in business, in politics, and also in science. Global cooperation, which for decades was considered an engine for innovation, problem-solving, and sustainability, is coming under pressure.
The consequences could be lasting if Europe and Germany do not react decisively and become more independent. The problem is clearly illustrated by the example of the conflicts that have spread across many countries. Distributed infrastructures for research data. More than a third of these are located in the USA. What was previously considered a sign of American innovative strength and evidence of an international role is now becoming a risk for Germans. If these repositories are no longer maintained, deleted, or even deliberately manipulated for political reasons, the foundations of countless analyses and forecasts will be undermined. Climate models, clinical studies, even the monitoring of pandemics, but also all research in the biological and life sciences with millions of database accesses daily or the use of preprint servers for cutting-edge and openly available publications would be massively compromised. The reliability of scientific findings, on which politics and society urgently depend, is at stake.
Germany and Europe can no longer rely on the availability of data and technical infrastructure from the USA. Our country's critical infrastructure includes not only utility grids, power plants, and internet lines, but also scientific databases, publication platforms, cloud services, research software, and AI models. We must build redundancies for this critical scientific infrastructure in Germany and Europe. At the same time, we must effectively protect them from potential political influence. This is a lesson from the situation in the USA.
What is needed now is a European strategy to develop independent scientific infrastructures. The goal is to secure Europe's scientific sovereignty and innovative capacity. At the same time, the crisis offers an opportunity to increase efficiency, improve data security and transparency, and reduce dependence on commercial providers.
Sovereignty and redundancy can be expensive: hardware, software, qualified personnel, and the long-term operation of these structures cost billions. This can only be achieved jointly in Europe and will not happen overnight. The EU will provide billions for this purpose in the coming years. But the scale of the investments that will be required on a long-term basis is also enormous.
Some things are already happening. For example, the federal and state governments have already taken important steps with the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and their involvement in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The Federal Ministry of Education and Research's new FITS2030 framework program also aims to promote technological sovereignty in key areas. Various initiatives are attempting to secure projects and platforms threatened by the US withdrawal. In climate research, for example, German institutions are taking on key tasks when US data or expertise is lost. In medicine, the publication database Europe PMC could serve as an alternative to the American PubMed. The Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (TIB) is building a "dark archive" for arXiv, a globally used archive for so-called preprints, i.e., advance publications of scientific papers. This hidden reserve stores a complete copy of the arXiv data decentralized in Germany. Should access to the original data in the US fail, the archive can be activated, thus ensuring free access to research results even in times of crisis.
As crucial as European sovereignty and structural security reserves are, it is equally important to carefully weigh the costs and benefits: A completely self-sufficient European scientific infrastructure would cost enormous sums and require enormous resources and capacities that we actually need for active research and personnel. We must therefore continue to share resources and collaborate – with the USA, but also with China. Cooperation will be essential in the future to jointly solve major problems such as climate, health, and nutrition. Sovereignty and cooperation are not contradictory, but rather the prerequisite for ensuring that science remains reliable, open, and innovative in the future. Science faces a mammoth task. But it also has the opportunity to emerge from the crisis stronger.
The author is Medical Director of the Heidelberg University Hospital for Neurology and has been Chairman of the German Council of Science and Humanities since 2023. [1]
The independence of these EU resources also could be used by notorious EU’s warmongering, censorship, and attacks on democratic norms. In these cases participation in such activities is participation in ruining lives of Western Europeans.
1. Wir müssen die Daten retten: Lehren aus Trumps Attacken: Europas Wissenschaft muss unabhängiger werden von den USA. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 04 June 2025: N2. Von Wolfgang Wick
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