LibGuides: Scholarly Publishing and Open Access: Open Access Data Sources

Open Data Defined

Open Data is data made available without restriction for re-use, with or without attribution, depending upon the host requirements.

Broader Data Repositories Listings

Data Repositories
Part of the Open Access Directory hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College.

Data Management Guide

The Boston College Libraries have a guide on Data Management. This guide is intended to support researchers who want to effectively manage their data. It is intended to help researchers to understand newer requirements from grant funding agencies for managing research data and the research data life-cycle.

Natural Science Data Repositories

Here you'll find a small selection of open data repositories in the sciences. Many more exist. For more extensive lists, see the links, below.

ChemSpider
Hosted by the Royal Society of Chemistry, ChemSpider offers compound data for nearly 25M compounds from almost 400 data sources.
Climate Change Knowledge Portal
Climate and climate-related data for policy makers and development practitioners, with WebGIS functionality for mapping data.
Dryad
Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Dryad is governed by a consortium of journals that collaboratively promote data archiving and ensure the sustainability of the repository.
GenBank
GenBank® is the NIH genetic sequence database, an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences (Nucleic Acids Research, 2011 Jan;39(Database issue):D32-7).
Geological Society of America Data Repository
A data repository for supplemental information for authors of articles in Geological Society of America journals.
National Center for Biotechnology Information
A superb resource, this site is the go-to place for quality data in the life sciences, data which happens to be freely available.
National Oceanographic Data Center
One of several U.S. national repositories and dissemination facilities for global environmental data operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce.
National Space Science Data Center
NASA's permanent archive for space science mission data.
PubChem
The leading freely-available, small compound database, part of the National Center for Biotechnology Information/ National Library of Medicine's Entrez suite of databases.
RCSB Protein DataBank
Information about experimentally-determined structures of proteins, nucleic acids, and complex assemblies.

Social Sciences Data Repositories

ESDS Qualidata
This database of open access qualitative data is maintained by the Economic and Social Data Service, which is associated with the UK Data Archive at the University of Essex. It has been a pioneer in digital preservation as well as metadata development for data archives.
Australian Social Sciences Data Archive
Maintained by the Australian National University, the ASSDA is the most comprehensive data archive in Australia. It collects data from around the Asia Pacific region and collaborates broadly with international data organizations.
The ARDA
The Association of Religion Data Archives is housed at Penn State University. Data cover American and international religions and draw on a wide range of sources from throughout the world.
National Archive of Criminal Justice Data
The NACJD aggregates data on various criminal justice issues. It also provides training in quantitative analysis. It provides access to two programs: the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and the Terrorism and Preparedness Data Resource Center.
World Bank
The World Bank now makes all of its data (including all 7000 World Development Indicators for over 200 countries) available free of charge, a move that may well effect a decisive cultural shift in favor of open data among international organizations generally.
UNData
UN data is all open access. Unique databases focus on topics such as crime, the environment, gender, and health. Data are sortable by country and date.