The Retraction Watch Database becomes completely open – and RW becomes far more sustainable

Today is a very big day for Retraction Watch and The Center For Scientific Integrity, our parent non-profit. Bear with me while I explain, starting with some history.

When Adam Marcus and I launched Retraction Watch in 2010, we envisioned it as a journalism blog that would break stories no one else was covering, and examine whether scientific correction mechanisms were robust. And for some time, that’s just what it was. Our traffic and visibility grew quite quickly, but the team didn’t. It was years before we even had an intern.

Things changed in 2014 and 2015. Three philanthropies – the MacArthur Foundation, the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), and the Helmsley Trust – approached us with some version of “We think what you’re doing is important. How can we help?”

Around that time we realized the world lacked a comprehensive database of retractions. We saw how many were missing from sources researchers used, whether PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, or others – including Crossref, more about which I will say in a moment. We were cataloging them in spreadsheets ourselves, but couldn’t keep up.

The three foundations all agreed to support our work, not just the journalism, but to create what became The Retraction Watch Database, officially launched in 2018. Part of that funding was a grant to create a strategic plan for sustainability and growth. One of the pillars of that plan was licensing the Database to organizations – commercial and nonprofit – who could use it in products that would help researchers know when what they were reading had been retracted, among other purposes. 

Those license fees – along with other income, particularly individual donations and a subcontract from a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) – have kept Retraction Watch and The Center for Scientific Integrity running for several years. We are deeply grateful for the support and show of confidence they represent. 

But we also always wanted to make the Database available to as many people as possible, whether or not they had access to tools that licensed it, if we could find a financial model that did not rely on such fees. (We always provided the data free of charge to scholars studying retractions and related phenomena.)

Fast forward to today. We’re thrilled to announce that Crossref has acquired The Retraction Watch Database and will make it completely open and freely available. 

For those of you unfamiliar, here’s how Crossref describes itself: “Crossref makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse. We’re a not-for-profit membership organization that exists to make scholarly communications better.” They are indeed the ideal home for the Database, and the perfect collaborator: A nonprofit organization that shares our mission and has a highly successful track record of building tools and resources that make research more efficient.

But there’s more. As part of our agreement with them, and to recognize the clear value of what Retraction Watch has created, Crossref has paid us an acquisition fee that is roughly equivalent to half of our annual budget. They will also pay us an annual fee, initially for five years, to continue to maintain and update the database. That fee covers the salary of our research director, Alison Abritis, as well as a new deputy for Alison who starts next week.

That means we have achieved sustainability – the highest priority goal for any nonprofit – for the database side of our operation. And the acquisition fee provides important unrestricted reserves that allow for breathing room and the potential for growth. 

Which brings me back to the journalism side of the house. Retraction Watch has, with the exception of about a year of its 13-year-existence, been a volunteer activity for me and Adam. It will remain that way. But our new and consistent funding stream means that I will be able to devote a lot of the time that I spent working on the Database – including negotiating data use agreements – on growing Retraction Watch itself. 

Thanks to a generous grant from the WoodNext Foundation, we now have two reporter-editors on staff. We know there are far more stories than two people – plus me and Adam as part-time high-level editors and directors – can tell. For a brief  period of time while all of our grants were in place, we had as many as five salaried journalists. I’d love to get back to that level of staffing, and will be working on fundraising and bringing in more revenue in the coming months and years. If that moves you to support us now, please do.

Thank you to Crossref, to those who have licensed our data, and to everyone who has supported us financially and otherwise over the past 13 years. We’re here for the long haul, and we’re grateful that you’ll be with us too.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].