This is a linkpost for https://www.wired.com/2017/01/john-arnold-waging-war-on-bad-science/
I had definitely noticed all the different nutrition, psychology, and biological initiatives like OSF or the Reproducibility Project, and how expensive they all are, but I didn't realize that they all owed their funding to a single source. (I had only ever briefly heard of Arnold in the context of pension reform.) I'm very glad Arnold is doing this, but I now feel more pessimistic about academia than when I assumed that the funding for all this was coming from a broad coalition of universities and nonprofits etc....
When evaluating whether there is a broad base of support, I think it's important to distinguish "one large-scale funder" from "narrow overall base of support". Before the Arnold foundation's funding, the reproducibility project had a broad base of committed participants contributing their personal resources and volunteering their time.
To add some details from personal experience: In late 2011 and early 2012, the Reproducibility Project was a great big underfunded labor of love. Brian Nosek had outlined a plan to replicate ~50 studies - ...