Our World in Data (OWID) is a scientific online publication that focuses on large global problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, war, climate change, population growth, existential risks, and inequality.
 | |
| Type of business | Non-profit affiliated with the University of Oxford |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Oxford, England |
| Owner | Global Change Data Lab |
| Founder(s) | Max Roser |
| Revenue |  ￡2,450,820 (2023)[1] |
| URL | ourworldindata |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | May 2013[2] |
| Current status | Active |
It is a project of the Global Change Data Lab, a registered charity in England and Wales,[3] and was founded by Max Roser, a social historian and development economist. The research team is based at the University of Oxford.[4] The organization is chaired by Hetan Shah.
Content
editOur World in Data uses interactive charts and maps to illustrate research findings, often taking a long-term view to show how global living conditions have changed over time.
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Compilation of graphs from the organization, showing the overall global percentages of the last two centuries, in six factors: extreme poverty, democracy, basic education, vaccination, literacy, and child mortality -
Global CO2 emissions by world region since 1750
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Cartogram showing the distribution of the global population. Each of the 15,266 pixels represents the home country of 500,000 people.
As of April 2024, Our World in Data categorize their charts and articles by the following topics on their website:[5]
- Population and Demographic Change
- Health
- Energy and Environment
- Food and Agriculture
- Poverty and Economic Development
- Education and Knowledge
- Innovation and Technological Change
- Living Conditions, Community, and Wellbeing
- Human Rights and Democracy
- Violence and War
History
editRoser began his work on the project in 2011,[6] adding a research team at the University of Oxford later on. In the first years, Roser developed the publication together with inequality researcher Sir Tony Atkinson.[6] Hannah Ritchie joined in 2017 and became Head of Research.[7] Edouard Mathieu joined in 2020 and became Head of Data.[8] The organization began the COVID-19 pandemic with six staff members, and grew to 20 by late 2021.[9][10]
In 2019, Our World in Data won the Lovie Award, a European web award,[11] and was one of three nonprofit organizations in Y Combinator's Winter 2019 cohort.[12][13]
Beginning in 2020, Our World in Data added an emphasis on publishing global data and research on the COVID-19 pandemic:
- They created and maintained a worldwide database on vaccinations for COVID-19, which was used as the source for data published by the World Health Organization,[14] researchers and other international organizations,[15][16] journals,[17] and numerous newspapers.[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]
- Similarly, the team built and maintained a global dataset on COVID-19 testing which was used by the United Nations, the White House, the World Health Organization, and epidemiologists and researchers,[27][28][29] and also published data such as hospitalizations and computations of excess deaths.[30]
In 2021, the team began campaigning for the International Energy Agency to make the data it collects from national governments publicly available.[31]
Funding and collaborations
edit
Global Change Data Lab, the non-profit that publishes Our World in Data and the open-access data tools that make the online publication possible, is funded through a mix of grants, sponsors, and reader donations.[32]
- The first grant to support the research project was given by the Nuffield Foundation, a London-based foundation focused on social policy.[33]
- Other grantors supporting the project have included the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and a grant from German philanthropist Susanne Klatten.[34] In the past, Our World in Data has also received grants from the World Health Organization, the Department of Health and Social Care in the United Kingdom, and the Effective Altruism Meta Fund.[35]
- Reader donations are also a major source of funding. In 2020, more than 3,000 individuals supported the project,[36] exceeding 4,000 donors by 2023. The list of donors includes Jamie Metzl and YouTuber Hank Green.[35]
The research team collaborated with the science YouTube channel Kurzgesagt.[37][38]
In the coronavirus pandemic, the team partnered with epidemiologists from Harvard's Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Koch Institute to study countries that have responded successfully in the early phase of the pandemic.[39] Janine Aron and John Muellbauer worked with OWID to research excess mortality during the pandemic.[40]
In 2022, FTX's Future Fund offered Our World in Data a $7.5 million grant to support their activities. Max Roser told Fortune that Our World in Data's board of trustees ultimately rejected the grant money after conducting due diligence and other checks.[41]
Usage
editIn 2021, the Our World in Data website had 89 million unique visitors.[42]
Our World in Data has been cited in academic scientific journals,[43][44][45][46][47] medicine and global health journals,[48][49] and social science journals.[50] The Washington Post, The New York Times,[51] and The Economist[52] have used Our World in Data as a source.
The site uses permissive licenses to allow others to copy, modify, and distribute the work (CC BY for content and the MIT License for software).[53]
See also
editReferences
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- ^ Roser, Max. "History of Our World in Data". Retrieved 29 April 2024.
- ^ "About". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 5 October 2018. Retrieved 23 August 2019.
- ^ "The Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development". Oxford Martin School. Archived from the original on 5 June 2019. Retrieved 5 June 2019.
- ^ Data, Our World in; Roser, Max (25 March 2024). "OWID Homepage". Our World in Data.
- ^ a b "History of Our World in Data". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 20 March 2021. Retrieved 29 October 2019.
- ^ Vaughan, Adam. "Hannah Ritchie interview: The woman giving covid-19 data to the world". New Scientist. Archived from the original on 21 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
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- ^ Wiblin, Robert. "Max Roser on building the world's first great source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data". 80,000 Hours. Archived from the original on 22 November 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ "Our World in Data - Team". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 20 March 2021. Retrieved 5 October 2021.
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- ^ "YC-backed Our World in Data wants you to know what's changing about the planet". TechCrunch. 23 January 2019. Archived from the original on 20 March 2021. Retrieved 23 January 2019.
- ^ "Our World in Data is at Y Combinator". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 20 March 2021. Retrieved 26 January 2019.
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- ^ Ledford, Heidi (4 June 2021). "Six months of COVID vaccines: what 1.7 billion doses have taught scientists". Nature. 594 (7862): 164–167. Bibcode:2021Natur.594..164L. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-01505-x. PMID 34089016. S2CID 235347317. Archived from the original on 22 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ Mathieu, Edouard; Ritchie, Hannah; Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban; Roser, Max; Hasell, Joe; Appel, Cameron; Giattino, Charlie; Rodés-Guirao, Lucas (10 May 2021). "A global database of COVID-19 vaccinations". Nature Human Behaviour. 5 (7): 947–953. doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01122-8. ISSN 2397-3374. PMID 33972767. S2CID 234362504. Archived from the original on 9 December 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
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- ^ Neville, Sarah (19 January 2022). "Pandemic exposes a world of healthcare inequalities". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 20 January 2022. Retrieved 20 January 2022.
- ^ Rodés, Andrea (18 July 2021). "'Our World in Data': ?El mundo va a mejor o a peor?". Crónica Global (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 17 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ "Covid-19 vaccine tracker: View vaccinations by country". CNN. Archived from the original on 24 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ Millán, Víctor (5 April 2021). "3100 gráficos de casi 300 temas distintos: así es Our World in Data, la web imprescindible para entender lo que ha pasado y está pasando". Xataka (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 21 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ "Max Roser on building the world's best source of COVID-19 data at Our World in Data". 80,000 Hours. Archived from the original on 22 November 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ "Most governments are not yet on track to hit their vaccine roll-out targets". The Economist. 6 January 2021. ISSN 0013-0613. Archived from the original on 25 November 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ Subbaraman, Nidhi (23 March 2020). "Coronavirus tests: researchers chase new diagnostics to fight the pandemic". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-00827-6. PMID 32205872. S2CID 214630708. Archived from the original on 30 June 2020. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
- ^ Yan, Holly (13 May 2020). "Trump says the US leads the world in testing. But it's far behind in testing per capita, studies show". CNN. Archived from the original on 20 March 2021. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
- ^ Hasell, Joe; Mathieu, Edouard; Beltekian, Diana; Macdonald, Bobbie; Giattino, Charlie; Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban; Roser, Max; Ritchie, Hannah (8 October 2020). "A cross-country database of COVID-19 testing". Scientific Data. 7 (1): 345. doi:10.1038/s41597-020-00688-8. ISSN 2052-4463. PMC 7545176. PMID 33033256. Archived from the original on 23 April 2021. Retrieved 29 April 2021.
- ^ "covid-19-data/public/data at master · owid/covid-19-data". GitHub. Archived from the original on 22 June 2021. Retrieved 20 January 2022.
- ^ Ritchie, Hannah (5 October 2021). "Covid's lessons for climate, sustainability and more from Our World in Data" (PDF). Nature. 598 (7879): 9. Bibcode:2021Natur.598....9R. doi:10.1038/d41586-021-02691-4. ISSN 1476-4687. PMID 34611360. S2CID 238411009. Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 May 2022. Retrieved 10 November 2021.
- ^ "How We're Funded". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 4 December 2021. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
- ^ "Our world in data". Nuffield Foundation. Archived from the original on 18 March 2023. Retrieved 18 March 2023.
- ^ "How We're Funded". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 4 December 2021. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
- ^ a b "How We're Funded". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 18 March 2023. Retrieved 18 March 2023.
- ^ Global Change Data Lab, Annual Report 2020 Archived 22 April 2022 at the Wayback Machine, Page 7.
- ^ Yau, Nathan. "Kurzgesagt". FlowingData. Archived from the original on 21 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ Whisner, Mary. "Library Guides: Law in the Time of COVID-19: Medical & Nonlegal Information". guides.lib.uw.edu. Archived from the original on 21 July 2021. Retrieved 21 July 2021.
- ^ "How experts use data to identify emerging COVID-19 success stories". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 29 November 2021. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
- ^ "A pandemic primer on excess mortality statistics and their comparability across countries". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 5 May 2021. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
- ^ Kahn, Jeremy (15 November 2022). "Is the collapse of Bankman-Fried's FTX crypto empire the end of Effective Altruism?". Fortune. Archived from the original on 15 November 2022. Retrieved 18 March 2023.
- ^ "Our Audience & Coverage". Our World in Data. Archived from the original on 4 December 2021. Retrieved 22 April 2022.
- ^ Nagendra, Harini; DeFries, Ruth (21 April 2017). "Ecosystem management as a wicked problem". Science. 356 (6335): 265–270. Bibcode:2017Sci...356..265D. doi:10.1126/science.aal1950. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 28428392. S2CID 11224600.
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External links
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