Sources for Obtaining Free, Open Source, and Public Datasets for Learning and Research

Learners may search these free, open, publicly accessible datasets for useful and meaningful datasets to use for data science and analytics learning and research.

National/International

• DataQuest: 21 Places to Find Free Data Sets for Data Science Projects
• The website at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is remarkable.  Public use NCES datasets, with electronic codebooks and data-analysis systems, are available free.  Some datasets can be downloaded directly online, while others are sent to you on a CD-ROM in the mail, on request.

By discipline, the majority of the datasets are free.

• Dryad - Access datasets from a curated general-purpose repository that makes data discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. https://datadryad.org/search  
• Data.gov - The home of the U.S. Government’s open data. 
• FedStats - This site provides access to the full range of official statistical information produced by the U.S. Government without having to know in advance which Federal agency produces which particular statistic.   
• UNdata - A portal for the United Nations' statistical datasets. 
• USAFacts.org - USAFacts is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan civic initiative making government data easy for all Americans to access and understand. We provide accessible analysis of US spending and outcomes in order to ground public debates in facts.
• The U.S. Energy Information Administration is committed to enhancing the value of its free and open data by making it available through an Application Programming Interface (API) and open data tools to better serve our customers. https://www.eia.gov/opendata/ 

Collections of Datasets

• Awesome Public Datasets - This huge, curated list of datasets is arranged
• DataHub.io - A collection of datasets that includes lists of countries, populations, geographic boundaries, economic data, and more.
• re3data.org - A registry of research data repositories
• Get data samples for Power BI
• Pew Research Center makes its data available to the public for secondary analysis after a period of time. https://www.pewresearch.org/download-datasets/
• IPUMS provides census and survey data from around the world integrated across time and space. IPUMS integration and documentation make it easy to study change, conduct comparative research, merge information across data types, and analyze individuals within family and community contexts. Data and services available free of charge. http://www.ipums.org/
• Climate Data Online (CDO) provides free access to NCDC's archive of global historical weather and climate data in addition to station history information. These data include quality controlled daily, monthly, seasonal, and yearly measurements of temperature, precipitation, wind, and degree days as well as radar data and 30-year Climate Normals. Customers can also order most of these data as certified hard copies for legal use.  https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/
• Kaggle Datasets
  https://www.kaggle.com/datasets