Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: the world faces many great and terrifying problems. It is these large problems that our work at Our World in Data focuses on.
Thanks to the work of thousands of researchers around the world who dedicate their lives to it, we often have a good understanding of how it is possible to make progress against the large problems we are facing. The world has the resources to do much better and reduce the suffering in the world.
We believe that a key reason why we fail to achieve the progress we are capable of is that we do not make enough use of this existing research and data: the important knowledge is often stored in inaccessible databases, locked away behind paywalls and buried under jargon in academic papers.
The goal of our work is to make the knowledge on the big problems accessible and understandable. As we say on our homepage, Our World in Data's mission is to publish the “research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems”.
All visualizations, data, and articles produced and published by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. Similarly, all the software and code that we write is completely open, and made available via GitHub under the permissive MIT license.
The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. We will always indicate the original source of the data in our documentation, so you should always check the license of any such third-party data before use and redistribution.
Our interactive visualizations are made through the Our World in Data Grapher, developed by us. All our software is open-source and free for everyone to use, but the code will require a relatively experienced developer to implement. If you are looking only to publish one or a few interactive visualizations on the web we recommend Datawrapper.
The Grapher is very helpful for publications looking to bring together many different datasets and publish hundreds of visualizations based on this data. You can read more about the Grapher here.
