The NIEHS Environmental Health Perspectives home page on November 5, 2025 (left), and December 1, 2025 (right), after it was taken down.
Highlights from the Change Log: NIEHS’s Only Journal – Environmental Health Perspectives – Is Suddenly Removed
Welcome! This post is part of the EDGI Website Governance Team’s “Highlights from the Change Log” blog series. The purpose of this series is to highlight interesting changes we have observed in the content of, or access to, federal websites. We want to share these changes to encourage public engagement with and discussion of their significance, as well as understanding of the ephemeral nature of website information. These website changes happened in December 2025 and feature the removal of the Environmental Health Perspectives website.
Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), is one of the most significant scholarly journals in both Public Health and Environmental Science. EHP is one of few journals supported by the federal government and is NIEHS’s only journal. EHP was one of the first journals to publish research on endocrine disrupting chemicals. EHP also publishes many articles on environmental justice, as well as many articles that feature community-based participatory research. It “publishes key findings in environmental health that are editorially independent from industry or corporate influence” and is fully open access: All issues, since the first in 1972, have been freely available on the NIEHS website. That is … until now.
Without any warning, notice, or redirect, the entire EHP website was taken down on December 1. Over 50 years of scientific articles, news posts, commentaries, editorials, and more—over 18,000 individual items—are gone, and none show up in a search of the NIEHS or NIH websites.
Earlier in 2025, EHP hinted at significant changes to come. In April, the journal stopped accepting new manuscript submissions, posting about the change on its website on April 23. In June, an editorial titled A Chapter Closes at Environmental Health Perspectives was published, stating: “Key contracts that provided the staff and processes needed to publish a journal would not receive renewed funding.” Without this funding, EHP’s future remains in doubt. A staff member at EHP said that the website is no longer being hosted by NIEHS and they will continue to work toward a new model as outlined in the June editorial. NIH has stated that this move is temporary, but provided no details on a timeline nor what entity would host this material in the future.
Currently, published EHP articles remain available at PubMed Central (PMC). Additionally, several subscription services include some of the EHP content online, but this access is generally limited to individuals associated with universities or other institutions. Because EHP is a U.S. government document, public access is required by statute. However, federal depository libraries and other access-providing institutions do not own government documents, and the federal government has often removed online access to documents. Whether or not the 18,136 EHP articles remain available online in the long term is an outstanding question.