Dear everyone,
I guess I don’t have to remind people on the last USA presidential election results and on the first policies taken by Trump in his first days in the white house.
There is already a general panic move in several fields from medical research to climate science, the latter where important data are not simply archived but purely deleted. [1] In addition to that, founding for missions or research projects seems to be unsecured, to say the least.
There are some initiatives in France, in solidarity with USA researchers, like the RogueESR petition and some call to protest, but there is not much more we can do.
Even if material science seems a bit far from the affected fields, it is not so far away, as application to energy storage, medical research or other fields that do not fit the Trump agenda might see founding cut and data destroyed. Some medical projects that just took biological gender as a population characteristic seem to have been concerned with publication control and founding suspension. 
With the forum’s code of conduct, and the fact that it is hosted on Material project’s servers (as far as I can tell from the FAQ), which is founded by DOE and NSF, the fallback to OpenKim’s infrastructure which have the same problems from COC to founding, it seems that this way of communicating might actually be concerned at some point.
Even if the removal of inclusivity statements seems enough for now, it is not reassuring to know that anything goes under the new administration and it is not said that we will be even allowed or encouraged to continue communicating here, at least in the next 4 years.
I might be a bit catastrophic here as I know there is some resilience to such events in the scientific communities, but I am interested to know if there are any action that are taken at the moment given the situation.
Concerning data preservation, I would encourage people who are not aware about it to learn about the NOMAD project which has its own section in this forum. I have some reservations I have with regard to their integration of AI in the analyses of workflows and results, the development of federated silos of data storage looks like a good solution to me.[2]
It would also be nice to have other perspectives from researchers around the world. You might even consider that this place is not the best to talk about these issues, and given what I said above, I wouldn’t really disagree.
Edit: After second reading, I’d like to note that the first victims of anti-DEI measures are also the people themselves who have my full support. I kept it on the technical part as this is the main purpose of the forum, but I am not forgetting the people behind the numbers.
Thankfully people are not so keen on letting years of hard work being destroyed so easily and some resistance exists. ↩︎
Funny thing is that I saw the talk of J. Rudzinsky at a CECAM workshop and wasn’t really convinced on the advantages of NOMAD compared to other initiatives. Now I think this makes a very strong argument in support of the FAIRmat initiative. You can find the slides from the talk on the website. ↩︎