Could be, who knows. Given our agreements with publishers we have to stick with terms of service that prevent abuse of the content and the system, but this doesn't mean that people won't try to get around them.

... aaand we're back. I'd like to once again iterate the point that the problems we have been experiencing are entirely of technical nature. Spikes in usage request by bots seem to be the cause of our trouble, so this is not connected to any particular choice of platform.

We are experiencing technical problems which are part of some growing pains (more content, more users, same infrastructure). At the moment there are no funding or programmatic threats to ADS. Thank you for your patience while we sort things out.

But yeah, I guess now wouldn't be a bad time to think about the unthinkable so that as a community we can be prepared for what will hopefully never come.

There's the data, the software, the compute infrastructure AND the agreements with partners who provide the data that goes into our pipelines. These are based on legal agreements between SAO and the publishers, so any change in operations would need to include a change in them

Since our move to the cloud in 2019 the mirror sites hosted in other institutes have become obsolete, so we don't have secondary platforms (our disaster recovery plan relies on institutional-backed storage). But even if the data were stored elsewhere, reproducing ADS would be quite complex task