Open Access Databases: Data

Africa Development Indicators contains over 1,600 indicators and time series from 1961 to the present for 53 countries. Data include social, economic, financial, natural resources, infrastructure, governance, partnership, and environmental indicators. The ADI Data Availability Query shows where data is available for a given country, series, and year.

Friendly interface for current U.S. Census data, including visualizations, data comparisons, tables, and GIS export.

The World Factbook provides information on the history, people and society, government, economy, energy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities. The Reference tab includes: a variety of world, regional, country, ocean, and time zone maps; Flags of the World; and a Country Comparison function that ranks the country information and data in more than 75 Factbook fields.

Data.Census.Gov, the interface that replaces American FactFinder, is the portal to US Census data and includes data from the American Community Survey, Population Estimates, Economic Census, and Annual Economic Surveys. Users can generate simple visualizations, extract reports, and explore census data by theme or topic.

DataLumos is the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)'s crowd-sourced repository where users can deposit copies of valuable government data.

Run by Open Knowledge Foundation, Data Portals is a comprehensive list of open data portals from around the world.

Research data is the foundation on which scientific, technical and medical knowledge is built. Oftentimes data sets do not leave the lab, or may go unnoticed as supplementary files. Elsevier provides solutions that support researchers to store, share, discover and use this data. By doing so authors are able to receive credit for the full spectrum of their work, and the wider research community benefits from the ability to discover and reuse the data. They are indexing images, tables and supplementary data from (Elsevier or Open Access) content sources, and are considering these to be research data components. They also index a series of domain-specific repositories, as well as non-domain specific ones.

The most comprehensive visualization of public U.S. Government data. Data USA provides an open, easy-to-use search and visualization platform that turns data into knowledge.

Deep Blue Data is a repository offered by the University of Michigan Library that provides access and preservation services for digital research data that were developed or used in the support of research activities at U-M.

The United Nations Statistics Division collects, compiles and disseminates official demographic and social statistics on a wide range of topics. Data have been collected since 1948 through a set of questionnaires dispatched annually to over 230 national statistical offices and have been published in the Demographic Yearbook collection. The Demographic Yearbook disseminates statistics on population size and composition, births, deaths, marriage and divorce, as well as respective rates, on an annual basis. The Demographic Yearbook census datasets cover a wide range of additional topics including economic activity, educational attainment, household characteristics, housing characteristics, ethnicity, language, foreign-born and foreign population.

The Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) database provides figures on the value of merchandise exports and imports by trade partners as well as area and world aggregates showing trade flows between major areas of the world.
Users must create a free login in order to access data.

EarthWorks is a discovery tool for geospatial data. It allows users to search and browse the GIS collections owned by Stanford University Libraries, as well as data collections from many other institutions. Data can be searched spatially, by manipulating a map; by keyword search; by selecting search limiting facets (e.g., limit to a given format type); or by combining these options. Data are available from numerous research institutions across the United States covering a vast array of subjects and base layer information. Thousands of datasets in vector and raster format have been described at the individual layer level allowing for easy searching and retrieval. You will find both public and restricted data. The restricted data are tied to the institution that holds the content.

The Environmental Data Explorer is the authoritative source for data sets used by UNEP and its partners in the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report and other integrated environment assessments. Its online database holds more than 500 different variables, as national, subregional, regional and global statistics or as geospatial data sets (maps), covering themes like Freshwater, Population, Forests, Emissions, Climate, Disasters, Health and GDP. Display them on-the-fly as maps, graphs, data tables or download the data in different formats.

Provides access to statistics and information produced by more than 100 U.S. government agencies.

The Global Open Data Index tracks whether this data is actually released in a way that is accessible to citizens, media and civil society and is unique in crowd-sourcing its survey of open data releases around the world. Each year the open data community and Open Knowledge produces an annual ranking of countries, peer reviewed by our network of local open data experts. The Global Open Data Index also provides links to countries' open data as well as a bulk download of the Index itself.

An international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.

ILOSTAT provides multiple datasets with annual and infra-annual labor market statistics for over 1000 indicators and 230 countries, areas and territories.

An online data bank containing statistical tables of demographic data for countries and areas of the world with a population of 5,000 or more. Allows users to download aggregated or parsed data, types of which reflect population, fertility, birth, growth, age, gender, migration, life expectancy, and mortality. Covers 1950 to present with projections to 2050.

The AfDB Statistical Data Portal has been developed in response to the increasing demand for statistical data and indicators relating to African Countries. The Portal provides multiple customized tools to gather indicators, analyze them, and export them into multiple formats. Covers several topics including energy, finance, business, social, etc.

Authored by Max Roser, an economist at the University of Oxford, this resource provides a series of choropleth maps and graphs related to human well-being, including education, violence and rights, income distribution, and health. Yet Roser's website is more than a series of visually appealing graphs; for each topic, Roser includes a link to the original data source (making his site, in his words, a sort of "database of databases") and analysis of the relative validity of each data set.

Service providing access to over 6,000 computer-readable datasets suitable for research and teaching purposes covering a range of different disciplines.
Note: Much of the data is open, but for safeguarded data, registration is required.

You can find official statistics produced by countries and compiled by United Nations data system, as well as estimates and projections. The domains covered are agriculture, education, energy, industry, labour, national accounts, population and tourism. You can also find indicators such as Millennium Development Goals.

Free and open access to global development data.

Provides time series development indicators data (1960-present) for 210 countries. Includes tables for population, labor and employment, education, health, energy, urbanization, national accounts, purchasing power, trade, government finance, monetary, balance of payments, external debt, investment risk, taxes, prices and exchange rates, transport and communication, and information and technology.