Find the Needles, Analyse the Haystack

Lessons in journalist-researcher collaborations from Phase One of the Illicit Finance Data Lab

The Illicit Finance Data Lab is an initiative established in December 2025 by ACDC and OCCRP to help scale up meaningful collaboration between investigative journalists and academic researchers working on illicit finance.

Thanks to the increasing availability of massive public and leaked datasets, we have an unprecedented opportunity to devise smarter approaches to fighting organised crime and corruption. But breakthroughs won’t happen without new forms of coordinated action.

This report shares valuable findings and insights from the first phase of the Data Lab, providing important context for why journalist-researcher collaborations are essential in furthering the fight against global financial crime and corruption. Combining the Data Lab’s own research with extensive input from the anti-corruption community, the report examines the most pressing challenges facing data-led investigative collaborations, spanning legal, ethical, data processing and funding issues, as well as cultural differences, and offers some of the solutions to these challenges identified during the start-up phase.

Data-Lab-Phase-One-Report_Final.pdf

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