Comprehensive Open Data Resources Guide

Your ultimate directory to the world's most valuable open datasets, research repositories, and data platforms. Discover, explore, and leverage data from trusted sources across every domain.

51 Data Sources
9 Categories
Possibilities

🌍 Global Open Data Aggregators

Multi-source platforms for discovering datasets across various domains

Google Dataset Search

1
Type: Meta-aggregator
Access: Free

Searches across millions of datasets hosted on various platforms. Perfect for general-purpose discovery of academic, government, and institutional datasets.

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Kaggle Datasets

2
Type: Community Platform
Access: Free + Registration

High usability platform with strong community support, competitions, and notebooks. Ideal for data science, ML model training, and hackathons.

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Data.gov (USA)

3
Type: Government Portal
Access: Free

Over 250,000 datasets from federal agencies covering economics, climate, agriculture, education, and transportation.

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Data.gov.uk (UK)

4
Type: Government Portal
Access: Free

Comprehensive UK government datasets for policy research, economics, and demographic analysis.

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EU Open Data Portal

5
Type: Government Portal
Access: Free

Pan-European data across health, finance, and agriculture for European policy research and comparative analysis.

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UN Data Portal

6
Type: International Organization
Access: Free

Aggregates data from WHO, UNESCO, IMF, FAO, World Bank for development indicators, SDGs, and international statistics.

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UN Comtrade

7
Type: Trade Database
Access: Free

Global trade statistics and commodity data for trade analysis and economic research.

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📊 Economic & Financial Data Sources

Structured economic and financial datasets for research and analysis

FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data)

8
Type: Central Bank Data
Access: Free

Comprehensive macroeconomic data including interest rates, GDP, employment statistics for economic analysis and monetary policy research.

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IMF Data Portal

9
Type: International Finance
Access: Free

International financial indicators, exchange rates, and macro forecasts for global economic analysis and policy research.

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World Bank Open Data

10
Type: Development Finance
Access: Free

Global development indicators and country-level data for development economics and poverty research.

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OECD Data

11
Type: Economic Organization
Access: Free

Cross-country data on policy, taxation, education, and energy for comparative policy analysis and economic research.

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Trading Economics API

12
Type: Data Provider
Access: Freemium

Clean global economic data with API access for real-time economic indicators and trading applications.

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🛰️ Satellite & Geospatial Data

Earth observation and geographic information systems

Copernicus Open Access Hub

13
Type: Satellite Platform
Access: Free + Registration

High-resolution imagery from EU Sentinel satellites for environmental monitoring, agriculture, and urban planning.

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NASA Earthdata

14
Type: Space Agency
Access: Free

Comprehensive climate, atmospheric, land, ocean, and hydrology data for climate research and environmental science.

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USGS Earth Explorer

15
Type: Geological Survey
Access: Free

Landsat imagery, elevation, and topographic data for land use analysis and geological research.

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OpenStreetMap (OSM)

16
Type: Crowdsourced Mapping
Access: Free

Global geographic data, regularly updated, for mapping applications and location-based services.

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Registry of Open Data on AWS

17
Type: Cloud-hosted Data
Access: Freemium

Petabyte-scale datasets including satellite imagery for large-scale geospatial analysis and machine learning.

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🏥 Health, Environment, and Demographics

Public health, environmental, and population datasets

Our World in Data

18
Type: Research Organization
Access: Free

Visualized global datasets on health, energy, education, and poverty for global development research and data journalism.

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World Health Organization (WHO)

19
Type: International Health
Access: Free

Disease statistics, health expenditures, and global health data for public health research and epidemiology.

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EPA Open Data

20
Type: Environmental Agency
Access: Free

Air quality, emissions, water, and waste data for environmental research and policy analysis.

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Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX)

21
Type: Humanitarian Organization
Access: Free

Refugee data, disaster response, and conflict zone data for humanitarian research and crisis response.

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NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information

22
Type: Weather Service
Access: Free

Global coastal, oceanographic, geophysical, and climate data for climate research and weather analysis.

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NIH Data Commons

23
Type: Medical Research
Access: Free + Registration

Biomedical and health datasets for medical research and drug discovery.

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🔬 Science, Research, and Technology

Academic and research datasets for scientific analysis

Zenodo

24
Type: Research Repository
Access: Free

CERN and OpenAIRE-backed repository with DOI support for academic research and data preservation.

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UCI Machine Learning Repository

25
Type: Academic ML Repository
Access: Free

Classic machine learning datasets for ML education and algorithm benchmarking.

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The Allen Institute for AI

26
Type: AI Research Institute
Access: Free

NLP and biomedical datasets for AI research and natural language processing.

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Hugging Face Datasets

27
Type: AI/ML Platform
Access: Free

NLP, LLM training corpora, and benchmark datasets for language model training and NLP research.

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OpenML

28
Type: Collaborative ML Platform
Access: Free

Reproducible ML experiments and community-driven datasets for machine learning research and algorithm comparison.

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Papers with Code

29
Type: Academic Research Platform
Access: Free

Links papers with datasets and code implementations for ML research and reproducible science.

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Figshare

30
Type: Academic Repository
Access: Free

Cross-disciplinary research data for research data sharing and academic publishing.

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Dryad Digital Repository

31
Type: Scientific Repository
Access: Free

Curated research data, peer-reviewed, for scientific research and data citation.

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Harvard Dataverse

32
Type: Academic Repository
Access: Free

Institutional-backed repository for academic research and data archiving.

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Open Science Framework (OSF)

33
Type: Open Science Platform
Access: Free

Collaborative research and reproducibility platform for open science.

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🏙️ Municipal and Urban Data

City-level datasets for urban research and planning

NYC Open Data

34
Type: Municipal Portal
Access: Free

Comprehensive, well-maintained city data including 311 service requests, restaurant inspections, property sales, and taxi trips for urban planning and city analytics.

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London Datastore

35
Type: Municipal Portal
Access: Free

Strong data visualization with city-specific data like Transport for London, population projections, and housing statistics for urban research and transport analysis.

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🌐 Knowledge Bases and Structured Data

Structured information and knowledge graphs

Wikidata

36
Type: Collaborative Knowledge Base
Access: Free

Multilingual, structured, machine-readable data for knowledge graphs, NLP, and entity recognition.

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The Internet Archive

37
Type: Digital Preservation
Access: Free

Historical data and cultural heritage collections for historical research and web archaeology.

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🔗 Data Platforms and Marketplaces

Platforms for discovering, sharing, and collaborating on data

Data.world

38
Type: Social Data Platform
Access: Freemium

Collaboration and data lineage platform for data cataloging and team collaboration.

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AWS Data Exchange

39
Type: Cloud Data Marketplace
Access: Freemium

Integration with AWS services and various data formats for cloud-based data workflows.

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Google BigQuery Public Datasets

40
Type: Cloud Analytics Platform
Access: Freemium

Instant SQL querying of massive datasets including Bitcoin transactions, GitHub activity, and healthcare claims for large-scale data analysis.

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Snowflake Data Marketplace

41
Type: Cloud Data Platform
Access: Paid

Live, ready-to-query datasets for business intelligence and data integration.

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Datarade

42
Type: Data Marketplace
Access: Freemium

Comparison of 500+ data providers for data procurement and market research.

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OpenDataSoft

43
Type: Data Sharing Platform
Access: Freemium

User-friendly interface and visualization tools for data publishing and European markets.

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Datahub

44
Type: Community Platform
Access: Free

Over 6,000 datasets from diverse sources for data discovery and NGO research.

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Data & Sons

45
Type: Data Marketplace
Access: Freemium

Financial datasets with a buy/sell/share model for financial analysis and trading.

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📰 Data Journalism and Survey Data

Datasets from media organizations and research centers

FiveThirtyEight

46
Type: Data Journalism
Access: Free

Datasets behind news stories and analysis for political analysis and sports analytics.

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Pew Research Center

47
Type: Research Organization
Access: Free + Registration

High-quality survey data on social and political trends for social research and opinion analysis.

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IPUMS

48
Type: Census Data Provider
Access: Free + Registration

Census and survey data across countries and time for demographic research and historical analysis.

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📋 Curated Lists and Directories

Comprehensive collections of data sources

Awesome Public Datasets (GitHub)

49
Type: Community-curated List
Access: Free

High-quality datasets organized by topic for data discovery and research starting points.

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Datacatalogs.org

50
Type: Data Portal Directory
Access: Free

Comprehensive list of global open data portals for government data discovery.

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Open Data Network

51
Type: Government Data Aggregator
Access: Free

Built-in visualization tools with multiple government sources for policy research and civic engagement.

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📝 How to Use This Guide

By Use Case

  • Academic Research: Zenodo, Harvard Dataverse, OpenML, Papers with Code
  • Machine Learning: Kaggle, UCI ML Repository, Hugging Face Datasets
  • Economic Analysis: FRED, IMF, World Bank, OECD
  • Environmental Research: NASA Earthdata, EPA, NOAA NCEI
  • Urban Planning: NYC Open Data, London Datastore
  • Business Intelligence: AWS Data Exchange, Snowflake, Trading Economics

By Access Level

  • Completely Free: Most government and academic sources
  • Free with Registration: Kaggle, Copernicus, Harvard Dataverse
  • Freemium: AWS Data Exchange, Data.world, OpenDataSoft
  • Paid Options: Trading Economics, Snowflake, Datarade

By Data Scale

  • Small to Medium: UCI ML Repository, FiveThirtyEight, Pew Research
  • Large Scale: Google BigQuery, AWS Registry, NASA Earthdata
  • Petabyte Scale: Registry of Open Data on AWS, Google BigQuery Public Datasets