Our World in Data

Our World in Data (OWID) is a free, open-access online publication that compiles, visualizes and explains data and research on large global problems, including poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, energy, war, existential risks, population growth and inequality. The publication is produced as a collaboration between researchers at the University of Oxford — affiliated with the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development — who serve as the scientific contributors, and the non-profit Global Change Data Lab, which owns, publishes and maintains the website and its data tools. Global Change Data Lab is a registered charity in England and Wales (charity number 1186433), and the organization is chaired by Hetan Shah.

Content is organized into longer narrative articles, bite-sized "Data Insights", topic pages and data explorers, grouped under themes such as population and demographic change, health, energy and environment, food and agriculture, poverty and economic development, education and knowledge, innovation and technological change, living conditions and wellbeing, human rights and democracy, and violence and war. As presented on its site, OWID covers more than 120 topics with over 14,000 interactive charts that can be embedded on third-party websites, plus downloadable datasets. Content is licensed under Creative Commons BY, with software published openly on GitHub; per its GitHub README, earlier versions of the code remain available under the MIT License via git history, while reuse requires written permission from Global Change Data Lab. Most underlying data is sourced from third parties such as the WHO, UN and World Bank and remains subject to those providers' license terms."]

Founding story

Max Roser, a social historian and development economist, began work on the project in 2011 and developed the publication in its early years together with inequality researcher Sir Tony Atkinson; the site launched in May 2013. A research team at the University of Oxford was added later.

Business model

Non-profit publisher: OWID gives away all of its content, charts and data tools for free under open licenses and funds operations through philanthropic grants, sponsors and reader donations rather than sales or subscriptions.

Funding comes from a mix of grants, sponsors and individual reader donations solicited on the website. Grantors have included the Nuffield Foundation (the first grant to the research project), the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, German philanthropist Susanne Klatten, the World Health Organization, the UK Department of Health and Social Care, the Effective Altruism Meta Fund and GiveWell. More than 4,000 individuals have donated over recent years. Global Change Data Lab discloses grants and audited financial statements in its Trustees' Annual Report.

Traction

The website recorded 89 million unique visitors in 2021. Its published site metrics show 14,085 charts, 126 topic pages, 29 data explorers and 503 articles. Its open-source repositories have substantial developer followings, including about 5,700 stars on the archived covid-19-data repository and roughly 1,550 on owid-grapher. More than 4,000 individual donors have contributed in recent years.

Latest developments

GiveWell recommended a $400,000 unrestricted grant in April 2024, published in August 2024, expected to support institutional and technological infrastructure and administrative costs while OWID develops a long-term growth strategy. Recent website output includes new articles on the spread of electoral democracy and on countries passing peak population, recurring Data Insights, and regular data updates drawing on the World Bank, the International Whaling Commission and the WHO. The organization is recruiting a writer, and its GitHub organization includes a repository of agent skills.