Open Data Resources

See also the Data Liberation Initiative  to access large raw datasets from the Canadian government (this is subscription, NOT open)

Increasingly, entire research and other raw data sets are becoming available for other researchers to use.

• ​Data Repositories Open Access Directory
• Google Dataset Search - 25 million datasets and growing fast
• Harvard Dataverse- about 150,000 datasets
• Mendeley Data - millions of data sets uploaded directly to Mendeley or from many of the other repositories and sources listed here, eg Harvard Dataverse, the World Bank, etc.
• DataCite - a DOI registry for research data sets with search engine
• KDNuggets List of Datasets
• Open Web Tools - a curated list of free data sets across a wide range of subjects, as of Nov 2022, over 470 sets and growing fast, with rich indexing for searching its contents
• Data Repositories list by broad discipline, maintained at Simmons College
• data.upei.ca: UPEI's repository of open data sets created by its researchers
• Canada: Open Data Portal
• Library Archives Canada - collection data export tool; This tool provides access to pre-defined data extracts from Library and Archives Canada’s collections. Users can download complete datasets in CSV format for research and analysis. As of Oct 2026, it just has Canadian Census data, but it is expected to continue to grow
• Borealis - Canadian research "open" data from many Canadian universities
• Australia: Research Data Australia - use the checkbox to limit to publicly accessible data sets - others require a subscription that UPEI does not currently have
• Dimensions - over 11 million datasets indexed, most but not all search functions on this site are free (UPEI does not have a paid subscription)
• Re3data.org: Registry of Research Data Repositories
• US Govt: data.gov and another one specifically for health data: HealthData.gov; 
  Harvard has also created a searchable archive of the data.gov datasets at Data.gov Archive Search: "The collection contains 17.9 TB of data across 311,604 datasets harvested"
• US National Library of Medicine's biomedical Dataset Catalog - over 77,000 sets and includes Borealis
• The European Union's Eurocentric dataset search page
• CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives)
• OpenAfrica OpenAfrica is not a government agency but calls itself a grassroots movement to open Africa related datasets
• Datamed.org - just biomed/health related datasets
• GDELT - monitors the world's broadcast, print, and web news from nearly every corner of every country in over 100 languages; The entire GDELT database is 100% free and open
• IEEE DataPort - over 3000 datasets. Some features are behind a subscription paywall (we don't have).

For more help finding a free dataset for your research project, contact your subject librarian.

Last updated October 2026 by Melissa Belvadi