Platforms discontinue or restrict access on timelines researchers do not control

Platforms that host research data can cease to exist, cease to provide access, or cease to be affordable, on timelines the platform controls and the researcher does not. The mechanism is not a single failure mode — it is the union of:

• Discontinuation: 191 research data repositories shut down 2012-2023; median operational age 12 years; 47% with no migration (E-0006).
• State action: China National Knowledge Infrastructure cut foreign subscribers off from dissertations and statistics in April 2023 under cross-border data review (S-0040). CERN terminated cooperation with ~500 Russia-affiliated scientists and Belarus institutions in November 2024 under EU/Swiss sanctions (S-0041).
• Governance turning adversarial: GISAID suspended individual researcher accounts in 2023 after publications it disagreed with; re3data downgraded it from open-access to restricted-access (S-0039).
• Access fees: UK Biobank transitioned 2023-2024 from bulk download to metered cloud-only on top of an existing £9,000 access fee, approximately doubling project costs (S-0042).
• API termination: Twitter eliminated its free academic research API in February 2023; 33,306 studies across 8,914 venues with 610,738 citations had built on it; over 100 active research projects canceled, halted, or pivoted (S-0038).
• Commercial capture: Elsevier acquired Bepress in 2017, putting >500 universities' open-access infrastructure under publisher ownership (S-0043). Mendeley Desktop EOL 2022 after a 2018 update lost user PDFs and annotations (S-0044). Academia.edu's premium tier rose from $99/year (2016) to ~$498/year (2026), with 40% of users in developing nations (S-0045). Elsevier and Springer Nature route TDM access to their 5,500+ journals through publisher-gated APIs under restrictive click-through licenses (S-0046).

Each mechanism is a different trigger for the same architectural failure: the researcher's data, code, or access depended on one organization's continued decision to provide it, and the organization changed its decision.