The Cochrane Collaboration provides medical research information in digital form to healthcare providers around the world. Though the Cochrane Collaboration’s resources, particularly its database of systematic reviews, are now widely used, little has been said about the motivations for the organization’s founding. This paper will look beyond the popularly repeated story, particularly among practitioners of evidence-based medicine (EBM), that the Cochrane Collaboration was founded in direct response to Archie Cochrane’s early 1970s calls to provide global access to randomized controlled clinical trials (and their results), and towards the institutional and technological forces that generated demand for the organization’s services.