Our funding: a note from the Chief Executive Officer

The Cochrane Collaboration is an amazing network of dedicated volunteers from around the globe. It has never been truer said that the sum of the whole is greater than its parts. The combination of this voluntary effort produces a synergy of intellect, activity and output that, it has been suggested, would take a billion dollars a year to create if it was to be started now using a more traditional organisational model. It has also been calculated that simply to purchase the Collaboration’s outputs from commercial sources would cost in excess of £100 million GBP.

The reality is that the central Collaboration and all its constituent groups in financial year 2010/11 spent in the order of £17 million GBP on its full range of activities, demonstrating the leveraging effect of funding the Cochrane network. Put simply, our funding model turns an unaffordable dream into an affordable goal. The role of the Collaboration’s centrally funded infrastructure is to enable the work of our 28,000 contributors in preparing – and supporting the production of – Cochrane Reviews. The income for this, reported in the Financial Statements, comes principally from royalties earned from sales of The Cochrane Library and is known as our ‘core’ income. The proportion of core expenditure spent on different tasks is shown in our Annual Report, both as a proportion of core income, but also – and making a more realistic comparison with other organisations – as a proportion of the overall income earned by all our groups. What is particularly striking about this second graph is that over 90% of income is spent on activities and development; only 2% on central administration. A record to be proud of.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the governments and organisations who fund and host our groups, and to those who continue to place their trust in Cochrane Reviews by purchasing licences to The Cochrane Library. Together, we will fulfil our vision of informing healthcare decision-making throughout the world with high-quality, timely research evidence.

Nick Royle,
Chief Executive Officer, The Cochrane Collaboration