Compendiums Open data and tools for checking evidence

Open data and tools for checking evidence

Datasets you can download, places to find and read research, and free tools and guides for doing the work again yourself.

34 resources, read at their own pages, most recently on 2026-10-21. Licences are given as each page states them. Links last checked 2026-10-23, all reached.

Data and measurements

Data.gov
U.S. General Services Administration, Technology Transformation Services
Search a catalog of about 431,000 U.S. federal datasets and follow each entry to the agency that publishes it.
Free · mixed · licence: not stated
Dryad
Dryad (nonprofit membership organization)
Search and download reviewed research datasets, many linked to published articles; depositing carries a fee unless an institution sponsors it.
Free · intermediate · licence: Datasets are made available "under a CC0 instrument"
Epoch AI data hub
Epoch AI
Download Epoch AI's datasets on AI models, benchmarks, chips and data centers as CSV, XLSX or ZIP files and rerun its compute trend analyses.
Free · intermediate · licence: Creative Commons Attribution license
Eurostat database
Eurostat, European Union
Filter European Union statistical tables in the Data browser and download them in several formats, or download whole datasets as TSV files.
Free · intermediate · licence: Website editorial content: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; reuse of statistical data is authorised with acknowledgement of the source
Figshare
Figshare
Search and download figures, datasets and code shared by researchers, and with a free account publish their own outputs with a DOI.
Free · mixed · licence: Set per item; free accounts offer CC0 (recommended for tabular data), CC BY, MIT, GPL and others
Gapminder data
Gapminder Foundation
Pick an indicator, preview it and download it as CSV or XLSX, or download whole datasets such as Systema Globalis from GitHub.
Free · beginner · licence: Data page: "Data can be reused freely but please attribute the original data source (where applicable) and Gapminder." Free teaching material: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
GBIF
Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF Secretariat)
Download species occurrence records from GBIF's network of data publishers, with a DOI to cite each download, after registering as a user.
Free with an account · intermediate · licence: Each dataset carries one of CC0, CC BY 4.0 or CC BY-NC 4.0
Harvard Dataverse
Harvard Dataverse Repository, Harvard University
Find and download research data and code from any discipline, and deposit their own with a DOI, in a repository open to all researchers.
Free · mixed · licence: not stated (depositors set terms of use per dataset)
Kaggle Datasets
Kaggle
Find datasets shared by others and download them with the Kaggle command-line tool, which needs a Kaggle account and an API token.
Free with an account · beginner · licence: not stated
NASA Earthdata
NASA Earth Science Data Systems Program
Search NASA's Earth observation data catalog and, after registering for Earthdata Login, download satellite and climate data from its data centers.
Free with an account · advanced · licence: No licence named; "EOSDIS data are openly available to all and free of charge except where governed by international agreements."
NOAA NCEI Data Access
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
Search, subset and download U.S. and global weather and climate records in CSV and other formats.
Free · intermediate · licence: not stated
Our World in Data
Global Change Data Lab, with researchers at the University of Oxford as scientific editors
Open any of its charts on health, population, energy and other topics and download the data behind it as CSV, with metadata in JSON.
Free · beginner · licence: Data produced by Our World in Data: CC BY; third-party data keeps its provider's licence
Retraction Watch Database
Crossref (acquired from the Center for Scientific Integrity in 2023)
Download the full list of retracted papers as a CSV from Crossref's GitLab, updated each working day, or search it at retractiondatabase.org.
Free · intermediate · licence: not stated
UN System Data Commons
United Nations system (statistics from 26 UN entities), built on the open-source Data Commons platform
Ask questions in plain language or browse statistics gathered from 26 UN entities, then follow each figure back to its source.
Free · beginner · licence: Reuse "is governed by the conditions specified by their respective sources"; access is free of charge
Wikidata
Wikidata editors, with the Wikimedia Foundation
Query structured facts about people, places and things with the Wikidata Query Service or its APIs without logging in.
Free · intermediate · licence: Structured data: Creative Commons CC0 License
World Bank Open Data
The World Bank Group
Browse the World Development Indicators by country or indicator and download time series through DataBank and the Data Catalog.
Free · beginner · licence: CC-BY 4.0 is the default for datasets produced by the World Bank itself; some datasets use ODbL, the World Bank Microdata Research License or a third party's licence
Zenodo
CERN and OpenAIRE
Search and download the data, code and papers researchers deposit, and with an account upload their own work and get a DOI for it.
Free · mixed · licence: not stated (each record shows its own)

Papers and literature

arXiv
arXiv (governed by its Board of Directors)
Read and download preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science and other fields, each under the licence its submitter chose.
Free · mixed · licence: Set per paper by the submitter: CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, CC0 or the arXiv.org perpetual, non-exclusive license 1.0
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
DOAJ Foundation
Search for open access journals and articles and check whether a journal meets DOAJ's inclusion criteria.
Free · beginner · licence: Journal-level and article-level metadata: CC0 waiver; website content: all rights reserved unless stated otherwise
Hugging Face Papers
Hugging Face
Browse recent machine learning papers, many linked to their GitHub code and arXiv page; paperswithcode.com now redirects here.
Free · intermediate · licence: not stated
OpenAlex
OpenAlex (US 501(c)(3) nonprofit)
Search and analyse records of about half a billion scholarly works in the web app, by API with a free key worth $1 of use a day, or as a full download.
Free with an account · intermediate · licence: CC0 public-domain license
PubMed Central
National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine
Search and read full-text biomedical and life sciences articles, and bulk-download some subsets for text mining.
Free · mixed · licence: not stated (the page says free access does not remove copyright; terms vary by article)
PubPeer
PubPeer Foundation
Look up a paper by DOI, PubMed or arXiv ID to read public comments on its data and figures, and comment with an account.
Free · intermediate · licence: not stated
ReScience C
ReScience C editorial board
Read peer-reviewed replications of published computational studies, with each submission reviewed and tested in a public GitHub issue.
Free · advanced · licence: not stated
Semantic Scholar
Ai2 (Allen Institute for AI)
Search more than 200 million academic papers, follow their citations, and use the public API or download the Academic Graph dataset.
Free · mixed · licence: Each dataset governed by the licence that accompanies it (examples given: CC BY-NC, ODC-BY); API under the Semantic Scholar API License Agreement
Unpaywall
OurResearch
Use its browser extension or REST API to find a legal free copy of a paywalled article from its DOI.
Free · beginner · licence: not stated

Tools

Google Colab
Google
Run Python notebooks in the browser without installing anything, signed in with a Google account, with paid plans for more compute.
Free with an account · beginner · licence: not stated
Jupyter
Project Jupyter
Keep code, results and notes together in a notebook that reruns, in JupyterLab installed locally or in the browser from the Try page.
Free · beginner · licence: BSD 3-Clause License (JupyterLab repository)
OSF (Open Science Framework)
Center for Open Science
Preregister a study plan, keep data and code in a versioned project, and find other researchers' public registrations and preprints.
Free · intermediate · licence: Site content: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) unless otherwise noted
R
The R Foundation
Install R on Windows, macOS or Linux to run statistical analyses and draw graphs from published data.
Free · intermediate · licence: GPL-2 | GPL-3
RStudio Desktop
Posit Software, PBC
Write, run and debug R code and reports in a desktop editor.
Free · beginner · licence: AGPL v3 license (Open Source Edition)

Guides

Data Carpentry lessons
The Carpentries
Work through lessons on spreadsheets, OpenRefine, SQL, R and Python built on real ecology, genomics, social science and image data.
Free · beginner · licence: "These lessons are distributed under the CC-BY license and are free for re-use or adaptation, with attribution."
Software Carpentry lessons
The Carpentries
Teach themselves the Unix shell, Git, Python and R for reproducible analysis from public lesson websites.
Free · beginner · licence: Text content: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License; software: MIT License
The Turing Way
The Turing Way community, supported by The Alan Turing Institute
Read its guides to reproducible research, project design, collaboration and ethics and apply the steps that make a project easy to rerun.
Free · mixed · licence: Content License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0)