What the recent US government shutdown has highlighted is just how much it contributes to the world's research infrastructure — with PubMed a striking example. By comparison, governments of other high-GDP countries contribute shamefully little.

The world urgently needs freely accessible, searchable, comprehensively referenced and cross-linked international repositories for the burgeoning amounts of untapped 'omics' data (lipidomics being one example). It is time for other wealthy countries to create and fund more such platforms.