While many donors do publish a lot of information, much of it remains hard to find and it is not made available in accessible or comparable formats. For the 22 indicators that are scored based on the format in which the data is published, lack of publication remains the biggest issue. Almost half of the information is not published at all. For information that is published, just under a third is published in IATI XML format and one quarter is published in other formats.

For these 22 indicators, some notable organisations publish no machine-readable data at all: France AFD, MAE and MINEFI, Germany Foreign Office, Japan MOFA and JICA, Switzerland, U.S. State, PEPFAR, and several other agencies in the very poor category.

Some organisations are noticeable for publishing a large proportion of their data in PDF format: IMF, PEPFAR, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. For three of the 22 indicators that score format – total budget, disaggregated budgets and results – over a third of the information published is only available in PDFs.