Education: Research Resources

During the week of April 21, 2025, there was news that ERIC had been defunded. 

According to the ERIC Help Desk the week of April 21, 2025, changes to the ERIC database were announced:

“The Department of Education is working with the Department of Government Efficiency to "reduce overall Federal spending" and "reallocate spending to promote efficiency" (EO 14222). As a result, the number of records added to the ERIC collection will be significantly reduced going forward. The number of actively cataloged sources will be reduced by approximately 45% starting April 24, 2025.  Subject matter was not considered during the process to identify which sources would be made inactive.  Please note that all records currently in ERIC will remain available.

There has been a delay in notifying publishers impacted by this content reduction due to the government reduction in force. Once publishers have been notified, a final list of retained sources (journals and non-journals) will be posted.  We will provide more information about this list as soon as possible.

ERIC Help Desk

National Center for Education Evaluation, Institute of Education Sciences

U.S. Department of Education

Email: ERICRequests@ed.gov”

ERIC was overseen by one person at the Department of Education. The work that was done to collect and catalog articles from the journal was done by an outside vendor (AEM Corporation). The staff person managing ERIC had their job eliminated by cuts to the Department's funding in April 2025. 

Several volunteers and partners of the Data Rescue Project have been working to back up the ERIC catalog and full-text PDFs. According to the DRP, “a DRP volunteer going by the username of crizzo has single-handedly submitted the links to 500,000 PDFs to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. To ensure continued access to the publications, crizzo has developed a lightweight rescue catalog called ERICA, which lists all the PDFs saved in the Wayback Machine together with their basic metadata, such as title, author and publication year.”

Given the funding cuts to the budget for the Department of Education, it is uncertain if there will be changes to their data collection, research activities and open access to those resources.

Librarians believe strongly in open access to information. Librarians are currently working to archive and back up data and information from the Department of Education. The most comprehensive project right now is the Data Rescue Project. The Data Rescue Project has a tracker page that shows what datasets have been saved and where they have been backed up.

The Sci-Op organization curates and preserves open datasets to ensure that there are multiple copies for preservation.

Sci-Op bulk scraped the Department of Education website on January 18, 2025. This includes the What Works Clearinghouse, and it includes the PDFs within the clearinghouse. 

If there is data that you have questions about or would like to see backed up, please email me and we can see if it’s already been backed up or if we can add it to the Backups list from the DRP.