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**Join us Sept.15th for a webinar with Rob Johnson: "From Anecdote to Evidence: Mapping the Impact of US Government Censorship on Public Health"
"Understanding Government Censorship" research project
We’ve shared a lot of stories in our newsletters about the damage being done by the Trump administration’s censorship of research, such as the deletion or alteration of ~400 federal datasets and the illegal firing of 24 National Science Board (NSB) members. These stories are powerful, but it’s all too easy to write them off as a series of individual incidents rather than an intentional pattern.
We are pleased to announce that we are partnering with one of our organizational signatories, Research Consulting, to conduct a study on the impact of this censorship. Registered on the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework (OSF) preregistration platform, this study will provide advocates, journalists, policymakers, and others with what we believe is the first rigorous, clear, and citable baseline study of the aggregated impact of U.S. government censorship.
The initial focus is on public health and epidemiology, but the methodology has been designed to be reproducible and expandable to other domains. The results of the study will be publicly available in October, ahead of the midterm elections, along with a set of visuals and other outputs, for use in news reporting and advocacy efforts. Collectively, they will concretely demonstrate the disastrous impact that this administration’s censorship is having on public health research and public health itself – and how that impact will continue to be felt long into the future.
Help us get this study across the finish line!
Ensure this work can continue by:
Contributing to a crowdfunding campaign. Research Consulting has run the first phase of this project for free. They expect the finished study to cost in excess of $50,000, representing several months of researcher effort, plus software licensing, design and development of the final outputs -- and hope to recover half of these costs through donations. We are asking the #DefendResearch community to help us raise the $25,000 needed to see this important project through. We’re very grateful to another of our organizational signatories, the Association of University Presses (AUPresses), for their generous seed donation to get the fundraising campaign started. Any amount you can afford will make a difference, no matter how small or large.
Spreading the word about the study. We’ll be sharing more information in the coming weeks, including holding a free webinar with Research Consulting’s Managing Director, Rob Johnson, at 11.00am ET on September 15. You will learn more about the study, help us decide what should be included in the toolkit that we’re developing to help you talk about it with your communities, and ask any questions you may have about the research or the rollout. Rob explains Research Consulting’s support for #DefendResearch and for this work as follows: “The events that we've seen unfolding in the US since early 2025 seem to me to run directly counter to the realization of our vision, and I believe we may well see similar developments in the UK and Europe over the coming years. I immediately identified with the work being done by the #DefendResearch to resist the growing censorship of knowledge and research in the United States and wanted to find ways that we could help.”
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