Research Guides: Secondary Research: Statistics and Data: Finding Datasets

Open data collections

The following provide open-access (freely available) research datasets. Note: "open access" does not necessarily mean that all the data are available for any type of use. You will likely find that the data have been made available by means of some sort of licence, such as Creative Commons - which detail exactly what uses are permitted or not. Most licences also include a citation requirement.

Make sure to read any licence thoroughly before downloading and using any open-access dataset.

Health Data

BC Community Health Data: This site was developed and is maintained by the Population and Public Health Surveillance team (part of Data & Analytic Services) at the BC Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC) to provide openly available community health profiles - both at the municipality level and community health service area (e.g., health authorities) level.
Health Canada Open Data: Openly available datasets in .csv and other formats on a wide range of topics including post-secondary students' reported alcohol and drug use; indoor air quality; diet/food intake data; radon in homes and much more.
Healthdata.gov: from the US Dept of Health & Human Services, this site provides datasets (and more!) on a vast array of of topics, including Covid-19, vaccinations, addictions, access to parks, activities of daily living and much more. To filter by subject, click the tags menu.
Open Health Data: European Union: from the official portal for European data, this site provides datasets on a vast array of health topics. You can limit by country, by clicking the Provenance menu.

Open data from federal governments:

Canada's Open Government portal: provides freely available datasets from the federal government and its agencies in a wide variety of file types. Agencies include:
U.S. Government's Open Data portal
UK Open Data

Google

Google Dataset search: This is not a repository, but a search engine for data repositories.
- At present this tool is optimized for repositories that use "schema.org and similar standards to describe their datasets."
- Datasets found through this search engine are subject to the access restrictions and/or licence terms set out by the repositories that host them.
- Using the search engine: Check out Google's Dataset Search Quick Start Guide.

Government Data with Access Restrictions

The following are data collections generated / provided by a government authority in Canada. These may also have some type of access restriction, e.g., may only be accessible after a certain amount of time has passed, aka an "embargo," or limited to certain types of users, such as researchers at post-secondary institutions. Some of these collections may include a mix of openly available and restricted datasets.

Some data may not be free, even for researchers, which you should consider when making any grant applications.

Make sure to carefully read all "permitted uses" and/or "access restrictions" documentation before making use of anyone else's datasets.

CANADA

The BC Data Catalogue includes many datasets on a wide variety of provincial topics, including historical drought levels, surgical procedure wait times, small business profiles, a bee survey and much more.

Some datasets are openly available, provided you agree to the Open Government Licence - British Columbia licence terms. To find open data, click the "Public" button in the Download Permissions menu.
Other collections are access-restricted and require written permission to download / reproduce the data. Read the information page for each collection carefully to see ensure that "downloadable" access will be permitted.
- Researchers can request access from the Data Innovation Program: Getting Access to Data page.

Health Data Platform BC: Data topics include chronic disease registry, COVID-19 Hospitalization and Critical Care Reports; Medical Imaging Wait Times (MIWT); Surgical Wait Times (SWT) and much more.

Note these data are not free except for students - the cost structure is outlined here: https://healthdataplatformbc.ca/index.php/academic-research-project
NOTE: some BC health data are freely, openly available from the BC Data Catalogue. Always check there first before paying any data fees! Academic researchers can apply for access to Health Data platform collections at: https://healthdataplatformbc.ca/index.php/apply-data-access.
Information on the Data access for students program is here: https://www.popdata.bc.ca/data_access/students

Data Liberation Initiative (DLI) - Statistics Canada:

Public Use Microdata Files (PUMF): provides "access to all anonymized and non-aggregated data, which is available through Statistics Canada's Electronic File Transfer Service (EFT) and an Internet Protocol (IP) restricted online database, Rich Data Services, with an easy-to-use discoverability tool."
- PUMF microdata are available for many of StatsCan's large-scale surveys including the Labour Force Survey, Canadian Internet Use, Canadian Income Survey, General Social Survey and more.
- Microdata from the Census of Population are also available
- Much of the collection is freely available to the public and can be immediately downloaded as a zip file. However, some may only be accessed through the DLI EFTS service. Current Douglas College employees and students can email rdm @ douglascollege.ca (no spaces) to request access to any PUMF file noted as only being available via EFTS.
- NOTE: anyone wanting to use these data will need to own and be experienced in using "data manipulation packages (or software) such as SAS, SPSS or Stata.

Canada's Research-Data Repositories

National repositories

FRDR: The Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) is a multidisciplinary, bilingual data repository that is freely available to researchers working at any Canadian institution eligible for funding from the Tri-Agencies - which includes Douglas College.

You can browse / upload its publicly available data, using its Lunaris search interface.

Borealis is a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository, supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada.

You can search, browse or download unrestricted data without needing an account, by using Lunaris, Canada’s national research data discovery service, and/or Google Dataset Search.

Finding International / Subject-based Repositories

Curated Registries: International Repositories

Canadian researchers are not obligated to deposit their research data in one of the Canadian national repositories. Depending on the context, it may be more appropriate to deposit in a discipline-specific repository. The following sites have curated lists of data repositories from around the world:

re3data - aka, Registry of Research Data Repositories, "is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines." You can search by name or browse by subject, content-type or country.
- Repository Finder - focusses on the "Earth, space and environment sciences community.... The tool is hosted by DataCite and queries the re3data registry of research data repositories."
FAIRSharing - "A registry of knowledge-bases and repositories of data and other digital assets." You can search by organization, domain, country and/or subject.
PLOS recommended repositories - from PLOS ONE - provides links to recommended repositories by discipline. Includes cross-disciplinary options as well.
The NIH provides information and links to a number of data repositories - both for generalist/multidisciplinary repositories as well as NIH-supported scientific repositories.
Nature has a great Data Repository Guidance page that includes a curated list of science data repositories, including health sciences, material sciences and the social sciences.
OAD (Open Access Directory) Data Repositories - from Simmons University, provides a "list of repositories and databases for open data."