Metropolia LibGuides: Library Support Services for RDI: Use of Open Data

Using and finding open data

With open science and research becoming more common, the opening of data, i.e. offering it for re-use, will also increase. Data collected in earlier studies or published by authorities or companies, for example, can be found in various data repositories.

Data repositories and search services

Below are links to Finnish and international data repositories. You can use them to discover open datasets that are of interest to you.

Aila (services.fsd.tuni.fi)
Research data stored in the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) and their comprehensive metadata in Finnish and English. You can freely browse and search data as well as read metadata. Some data is also freely available for download. Others require particular access rights.
Avoindata.fi
Datasets published by ministries, government agencies and institutions, regions, municipalities, companies, associations and private individuals.
Data Europa EU
The portal offers a centralised access to data produced by the authorities of EU countries. The portal is available in all official languages of the EU.
Etsin
The Etsin service allows you to search for research datasets and their metadata in the Fairdata services.
EUDAT-B2Find
EUDAT-B2FIND is a European database of metadata. The service is a part of a wider entity realised with the Horizon 2020 funding.
The Language Bank of Finland
The Language Bank has a wide variety of text and speech corpora and tools for studying them. The corpora can be analysed and processed in a virtual workspace with the Language Bank tools or downloaded onto your own computer.
OpenAire
The OpenAire portal harvests European and international publication repositories and contains millions of open publications and datasets.
Research.fi
A service offered by the Ministry of Education and Culture that collects and shares information on research conducted in Finland. Harvests metadata from a number of Finnish data catalogues. The service was established in 2020 and is being developed in stages.
Zenodo
Maintained by CERN, Zenodo is a service for storing and sharing open publications and data. Zenodo allows you to store datasets from every discipline. In addition to datasets, the service can store e.g. posters, presentations, conference publications, images and articles. Every publication uploaded to Zenodo receives a persistent identifier.

Citing data

Citing data follows the same principles as citing publications. Data citations ensure that others can find the data, and the author of the data is merited for the use of their data.

The key parts of a data citation are:

Author(s)
Name – name of the research data
Date – year the research data was added to the archive
Publisher/Distributor
Version number – in cases where several versions are available
Link – a persistent digital identifier, such as DOI or URN, is recommended

Citing data in publications

Several data repositories and metadata search services offer ready references.