"This fact sheet provides a brief overview of some of the issues associated with managing IPR [Intellectual Property Rights] in data projects." This document is a great way to understand why you might want to use an Open Data License instead of Creative Commons and how these are different from software licenses.

Describes Creative Commons and Open Data licenses.

Describes how common licenses used for research data products.

Includes examples

Includes good and bad examples

"Generalist repositories can also accommodate data that may not have an existing disciplinary repository. Because the data can come from many fields, the common fields used to describe and categorize data can be fairly broad Once you are familiar with the repository though, there can be ways to hone in on metadata related to specific topics."

"Under the OPEN Government Data Act, which is Title II of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, government data is required to be made available in open, machine-readable formats, while continuing to ensure privacy and security."

"Data is never neutral. [...] public databases may lag years behind how researchers and activities are reconfiguring identity groups and other classifications. Why does this matter for racial equity work? Because the people most likely to be excluded in public data sets often represent populations who are already the most marginalized and invisibilized"

"In addition to making datasets universally accessible and useful, Dataset Search's mission is to:

Foster a data sharing ecosystem that will encourage data publishers to follow best practices for data storage and publication
Give scientists a way to show the impact of their work through citation of datasets that they have produced

As more dataset repositories use schema.org and similar standards to describe their datasets, the variety and coverage of datasets that users find in Dataset Search will continue to grow."

An Oklahoma-based guide listing many of the resources below and more.

"Database covers all countries and contains over eleven million placenames that are available for download free of charge."

How to find maps in the Youngblood Energy (Geology) Library in Sarkey's Energy Center.

Geographic search, indexing scientific research studies. Some have GIS data, some do not.

Open Data Portal hosted by the publisher of ArcGIS.

"Native Land Digital is a Canadian not-for-profit organization, incorporated in December 2018. Native Land Digital is Indigenous-led, with an Indigenous Executive Director and Board of Directors who oversee and direct the organization. [...] Maps potentially function as colonial artifacts and represent a very particular way of seeing the world – a way primarily concerned with ownership, exclusivity, and power relations."

"Census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space."

"SEDAC, the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center, is one of the Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) in the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Focusing on human interactions in the environment, SEDAC has as its mission to develop and operate applications that support the integration of socioeconomic and earth science data and to serve as an "Information Gateway" between earth sciences and social sciences."

NASA

"Gapminder produces free teaching resources making the world understandable based on reliable statistics."

"The information system PANGAEA is operated as an Open Access library aimed at archiving, publishing and distributing georeferenced data from earth system research. The system guarantees long-term availability of its content through a commitment of the hosting institutions."

"Within the WorldPop project a range of open geospatial datasets are combined in a flexible regression tree framework to reallocate contemporary aggregated spatial population count data."

Sponsored by the USDA and Natural Resources Conservation Service

Commission for Environmental Cooperation

"An idea in 2007 to make geographic data easily accessible and understandable to policy makers grew into what is now PolicyMap: a data warehouse of over 50,000 indicators accessible through a state-of-the-art mapping and analytics platform."

"This information has been meticulously sourced from the three largest, most comprehensive and impartial crowdsourced databases on police killings in the country: FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net. We've also done extensive original research to further improve the quality and completeness of the data; searching social media, obituaries, criminal records databases, police reports and other sources to identify the race of 90 percent of all victims in the database." Provides map and infographics as well as raw data download as spreadsheet.

Search within the research areas on the site for GIS data specific to your needs.

Learn about America's communities through our data profiles. They cover 100,000+ different geographies: states, counties, places, tribal areas, zip codes, and congressional districts. For each, we cover topics like education, employment, health, and housing just to name a few.

Partnership between the U.S. Census Bureau and a consortium that includes the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the University of Texas at Arlington, Southern Methodist University, the University of North Texas, and the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council Foundation. OU is also a consortium member so OU researchers can contact this branch for help with US Census data.

National Historic Geographic Information System
Hosted by University of Minnesota

Links to National Map, National Atlas and Geospatial One Stop

Each office has their own data centers.

"Redlining directed both public and private capital to native-born white families and away from African American and immigrant families. As homeownership was arguably the most significant means of intergenerational wealth building in the United States in the twentieth century, these redlining practices from eight decades ago had long-term effects in creating wealth inequalities that we still see today. Mapping Inequality, we hope, will allow and encourage you to grapple with this history of government policies contributing to inequality." The data are available as shapefiles and GeoJSON, and are searchable by description, transcription, city, and state.

"D4BL has worked to consolidate state level data to explore the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black people in the US. The D4BL COVID-19 Dataset captures state-level COVID-19 cases and deaths for Black people in the United States. D4BL established a team of volunteer data scientists to develop a codebase for automating the data extraction from state websites and storing it into this dataset."

"A group of Inuit experts, community researchers, and university researchers, have worked together over the past several years to document specialized Inuit knowledge about sea ice. Inuit elders and hunters are the local experts on sea ice. Through long term observation and experience with the sea ice, they have developed deep and rich understandings of the marine environment"

Commercial airline data sets with a focus on revenue metrics

Datasets from Princeton University’s Gas Dynamics Lab

Provides air quality data for 500 U.S. cities, as well as U.S. consulates and embassies. Includes an interactive map.

Open data repository for data on materials and chemical information, including alloys, polymers, and semiconductors.

Provides statistics and other data relating to major energy sectors, including petroleum, natural gas, coal, nuclear, and renewables.

Also known as Data Search, find materials and properties information from technical references.

A material properties database that emphasizes ease of comparison. The data are sourced from published standards, academic literature, and supplier documentation.

Discover published datasets; provides resources to help you publish your own datasets.

Search for materials by chemistry, composition, or property. Also offers computational tools that can predict the properties of novel materials.

Open access repository for geochemical datasets

Supplemental data from Geological Society of America publications

Sponsored by the NSF, IRIS provides wide ranging seismic data, including time series, event, and historical data.

NIEHS supported public data sets.

Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) is a freely available dictionary of molecular entities focused on ‘small’ chemical compounds. (European Bioinformatics Institute)

CTD illuminates how environmental chemicals affect human health.

Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is the foundation of new innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data.

The NIEHS Environmental Genome Project is a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort focused on examining the relationships between environmental exposures, inter-individual sequence variation in human genes and disease risk in U.S. populations.

International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology data sources.

Links to 12 science related data sets supported by NIEHS.

Directory of Open Access Repositories.

EcoCyc is a scientific database for the bacterium Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655. The EcoCyc project performs literature-based curation of the entire genome, and of transcriptional regulation, transporters, and metabolic pathways.

"The Gene Ontology (GO) knowledgebase is the world’s largest source of information on the functions of genes. This knowledge is both human-readable and machine-readable, and is a foundation for computational analysis of large-scale molecular biology and genetics experiments in biomedical research."

The Human Genome Project (HGP) refers to the international 13-year effort, formally begun in October 1990 and completed in 2003, to discover all the estimated 20,000-25,000 human genes and make them accessible for further biological study.

"Making data and images of millions of biological specimens available on the web"

"Contains over 75,000 assessments of species, subspecies, varieties and subpopulations covering a variety of taxa"

MetaCyc is a curated database of experimentally elucidated metabolic pathways from all domains of life. MetaCyc contains 2453 pathways from 2788 different organisms

Animal movement data from a variety of sources (GPS tracking, geolocators, etc.)

"NEON collects environmental data and archival samples that characterize plant, animals, soil, nutrients, freshwater and atmosphere from 81 field sites strategically located in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems across the U.S."

AquaDocs is an open access repository covering the natural marine, estuarine/brackish and freshwater environments. It includes all aspects of the science, technology, management and conservation of these environments, their organisms and resources, and the economic, sociological and legal aspects.

National Biological Information Infrastructure website was sacrificed by the Federal Government in 2012. The University of North Texas has archived portions of this resource.

"Qiita allows users to download public data as well as the user’s own private data. This data can then be used for processing and analysis in external tools."

The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) maintains a database of genetic and molecular biology data for the model higher plant Arabidopsis thaliana

The plant collections of the Smithsonian Institution began with the acquisition of specimens collected by the United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842). These formed the foundation of a National Herbarium which today numbers over 5 million historical plant records, placing it among the world's largest and most important. Over 4.2 million specimen records (including over 115,000 type specimens with images) are currently available in this online catalog

Catalog of all NCBI databases and tools

If you don't know which specialized database below to use, start by searching all databases.

Gene integrates information from a wide range of species. A record may include nomenclature, Reference Sequences (RefSeqs), maps, pathways, variations, phenotypes, and links to genome-, phenotype-, and locus-specific resources worldwide.

GEO is an international public repository that archives and freely distributes microarray, next-generation sequencing, and other forms of high-throughput functional genomics data submitted by the research community.

This resource organizes information on genomes including sequences, maps, chromosomes, assemblies, and annotations.

The Nucleotide database is a collection of sequences from several sources, including GenBank, RefSeq, TPA and PDB. Genome, gene and transcript sequence data provide the foundation for biomedical research and discovery.

The Conserved Domain Database is a resource for the annotation of functional units in proteins. Its collection of domain models includes a set curated by NCBI, which utilizes 3D structure to provide insights into sequence/structure/function relationships.

The Protein database is a collection of sequences from several sources, including translations from annotated coding regions in GenBank, RefSeq and TPA, as well as records from SwissProt, PIR, PRF, and PDB. Protein sequences are the fundamental determinants of biological structure and function.

Contains macromolecular 3D structures derived from the Protein Data Bank, as well as tools for their visualization and comparative analysis.

The Taxonomy Database is a curated classification and nomenclature for all of the organisms in the public sequence databases. This currently represents about 10% of the described species of life on the planet.