Thread by @MaxCRoser

Some were surprised to hear that it is (and always has been) difficult for us to find funding to build OurWorldInData.org.

👇 I want to explain the situation in a short thread.

First, I don’t want to overdramatize.
We love what we do and would do this work without pay (I know this because in the past we did).

And we do have funding. Here we list every grant we ever received and the many, many of you who donated to us: ourworldindata.org/supporters

But it is true that with more funding we could offer longer-term security to us in the team and we could do much more.

(Over the last year we did our work as a team of 3.5 researchers and 2 developers.)

I started doing this work 9 years ago. And from this experience I see three reasons why we struggle to find long-term funding.

1] We are a non-profit because it is our mission to make the existing research and data on large global problems accessible.

The current situation of science is frustrating.

There are thousands of researchers that dedicate their entire lives to study a wide range of large global problems – and how we can make progress against them.

And then their work gets locked up behind paywalls.

In opposition to this our work has always been – and will always be – free for everyone to use.

– All data on OurWorldInData.org is available for download.
– All visualizations and text are Creative Commons licensed.
– All the tools we build are open source.

2nd reason:

We see most value in the well-established research and in the use of existing data, but large science funders want to fund original research.

I made made an illustration of what I mean.

3rd reason:

We build infrastructure.

We built a database with 80,000 metrics,
we build open-source visualization tools that you can use to explore them,
and we wrote about many hundreds (thousands?) of academic papers to allow you to make sense of it all.

I believe in science, building infrastructure is one of the most valuable things to do, but it is not very attractive for funders.

To a good extent it means funding maintenance.

(The reason why our roads and bridges are crumbling is the same reason why we at @OurWorldInData struggle to get funding.)

But infrastructure should be funded.
Many rely on us:

– We have millions of readers every month.

Some come to win a battle on social media. Others tell us that our publication changed their life and that they decided to work on one of the large global problems that we focus on.

– Journalists rely on us (currently we are cited many hundred times per month)

– Academic colleagues rely on us (our current citation rate is 5 per day)

– Teachers and professors rely on us.

High school teacher Matt Cone wrote about how he uses our work ourworldindata.org/how-use-owid-f…

And we know that universities in all corners of the world use our work.
From the fanciest elite unis to those that need our free material the most.

– Some use OWID in ways that I never expected

Jill Gordon – a medical doctor – wrote us this letter a while ago.

She uses our work to help patients who struggle with mental health problems:
ourworldindata.org/how-i-use-our-…

Some might be bad luck.

Last year I was optimistic that we get funding for the coming years and then it was rejected with the explanation that we are ‘too early in the journey’.
(We’ve been doing this for 9 years: ourworldindata.org/history-of-our…)

For a small team like us these rejections are frustrating because – as many of you will know very well – it’s a ton of work to get these grant applications done and then it all goes nowhere.

I hope that clarifies the questions you had and makes some sense.

Happy to answer any questions. And maybe I do something wrong and then I’d be very happy to know that.