The moderators, subject matter experts who are paid a nominal stipend for curating and contextualizing the numerous infectious diseases reports ProMED posts to its website and pumps out to its mailing list daily, have been on strike since early August.

The decision to stop work was in protest of plans announced in mid-July by the International Society of Infectious Diseases to convert ProMED into a subscription service, putting its valuable archive behind a paywall. The move is part of an effort to shore up the site financially, and the ISID said, to stop others from scraping ProMED data, which they then monetize.