Finding Government Data Sources

Gathers data, builds tools and collaborates with reporters to provide access to public records. Some projects have been archived by the Stanford Digital Repository, which ensures their long-term preservation.

Harvard Law School's complete archive of federal public datasets linked by data.gov. The collection includes over 311,000 datasets harvested during 2024 and 2025.

An initiative to identify, obtain, reformat, clean, document, publish, and disseminate government datasets of public interest.

The Data Rescue Project (originally started on BlueSky with resources shared on Google) shows current collaborative data rescue efforts, tracks the status and availability of resources, and offers downloads of rescued data.

In response to political threats to social, environmental, health, and personal data, the University of Washington Center for Advances in Libraries, Museums, and Archives (CALMA) in collaboration with Seattle-based BKS Studio, is hosting a series of DATA RESCUE efforts.

Generalist repository available to help with data publication, storage, and preservation.

A robust repository for research data, hosted by Harvard University. Note: "IQSS Dataverse has been experiencing service instability due to increasingly intense automated data-scrubbing. We are working with Harvard Systems to stabilize the situation."

"Preserving Public U.S. Federal Data" - Team focused on mirroring data on non-government servers.

Provides a repository of hundreds of thousands of pages of original government materials, information on how to file requests and tools to make the requesting process easier.

Based in the EU, USA, and globally - this initiative has access to 1-2 PB (and more on the way) of storage & people willing to seed. Have several large-scale efforts, including a 350GB web archive of CDC, including all 30.000 files from archive.cdc.gov and much more. There is a forum you can join.

The Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) is devoted to educational activities and to preserving the public good represented by federal statistical collections.

The Data Curation Network (DCN) is a membership organization of institutional and non-profit data repositories whose vision is to advance open research by making data more ethical, reusable, and understandable. Our mission is to empower researchers to publish high quality data in an ethical and FAIR way, collaboratively advance the art and science of data curation by creating, adopting, and openly sharing best practices, and supporting thoughtful, innovative, and inclusive data curation training and professional development opportunities.

Based at the University of Minnesota, the DCN also facilitates a shared-curation workflow, in which datasets from one institution are matched with an expert at a different member institution.

The Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) is a research collaborative and network of diverse professionals promoting evidence-based policy-making and public interest science that advances the Environmental Right to Know (ERTK). They have been archiving US federal environmental data.

Free Government Information (FGI) — ISSN 2377-0910 — is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

IASSIST (International Association for Social Science Information Service and Technology) is an international organization of professionals working with information technology and data services to support research and teaching. IASSIST was founded in 1974. We want to leverage our unique expertise in the social sciences to help benefit all data professionals and support open science.

Our members work in information technology, libraries, data services, research & higher education, government, non-profit and private research sector to discover data, curate it, make it available, and keep it available. We work together to advocate for responsible data management and use, to build a broader community surrounding research data, and encourage the development of data professionals.

RDAP (Research Data Access & Preservation) supports an engaged community of information professionals committed to creating, maintaining, advancing, and teaching best practices for research data, access, and preservation.

The RDAP community brings together a variety of individuals, including data managers and curators, librarians, archivists, researchers, educators, students, technologists, and data scientists from academic institutions, data centers, funding agencies, and industry who represent a wide range of STEM disciplines, social sciences, and humanities.

The Silencing Science Tracker is a joint initiative of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University and the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund. It tracks government attempts to restrict or prohibit scientific research, education or discussion, or the publication or use of scientific information, since the November 2016 election.