Our World in Data
Our World in Data is an Oxford-based data publication that provides open research, datasets and interactive charts on global living conditions and long-term change. Published by the non-profit Global Change Data Lab, it presents research and data to make progress against the world's largest problems — poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, inequality and existential risks — and makes everything it produces freely available as a public good. Its charts and datasets are used by teachers, journalists, researchers and policymakers worldwide.
Among the organisations in this directory, Our World in Data is the purest example of syndication by openness. It does not sell a wire or a subscription; it publishes data visualisations under open licences, actively encouraging republication. News outlets cite or embed its work tens of thousands of times a year, and during the COVID-19 pandemic its vaccination and testing datasets became infrastructure for the World Health Organization, governments and newspapers across the globe.
Founding by Max Roser in 2011
Our World in Data was founded in 2011 by Max Roser, a German economist and philosopher then working at the University of Oxford. Roser began the project to document long-term changes in global living conditions, encouraged by the inequality researcher Sir Tony Atkinson, with whom he developed the publication in its first years. For several years he was its sole author, building and funding it himself — at one stage financing the project through seasonal work as a bicycle tour guide in Europe — before funding allowed a research team to form at Oxford in 2015.
Roser has summarised his outlook in three statements that frame the whole publication: the world is much better; the world is awful; the world can be much better. The mission, he has written, has never changed since 2011: focus on the big global problems and ask how progress against them is possible, against the enemies of apathy and cynicism. Roser serves as the publication's founder and director, as programme director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development, and as co-executive director of Global Change Data Lab.
Global Change Data Lab and Oxford Home
The publisher behind the website is Global Change Data Lab, a non-profit organisation that publishes and maintains Our World in Data and the data tools that make its work possible. The project is rooted at the University of Oxford, where Roser's programme sits within the Oxford Martin School, and its research team grew there — Hannah Ritchie joined in 2017 and became head of research; Edouard Mathieu joined in 2020 and became head of data. The organisation began the COVID-19 pandemic with six staff and grew to about twenty by late 2021.
In 2019 Our World in Data was one of three non-profits in the Winter cohort of the Y Combinator accelerator — an unusual step for an academic publication, reflecting an ambition to build technology with the rigour of a start-up and the mission of a public institution. The same year it won a Lovie Award, a European award for online excellence. The Oxford base gives the Lab academic depth and access to specialist researchers; the non-profit structure keeps its output free.
What It Publishes
The publication organises its work by topic: population and demographic change; health; energy and environment; food and agriculture; poverty and economic development; education and knowledge; innovation and technological change; living conditions, community and wellbeing; human rights and democracy; and violence and war. Within each topic, readers find articles explaining the evidence, topic pages assembling the key charts, and thousands of interactive visualisations built from underlying datasets.
The distinguishing feature is the time horizon. Where news reports events, Our World in Data reports trends measured in decades and centuries — life expectancy since 1770, child mortality over generations, the long rise of literacy and the recent fall of extreme poverty. Charts can be adjusted by country and period, downloaded, and reused; the aim is that a reader leaves understanding not only the current level of a problem but its trajectory, and therefore whether progress is happening and how fast.
Data Method and Open Licensing
Each dataset is assembled from published sources — statistical agencies, international organisations, academic studies — cleaned, standardised and documented, with sources and methods described so others can verify and build on the work. The Lab also develops its own data infrastructure and shares its tools and code openly. Content is published under open licences for free reuse, a policy that is the engine of its distribution: a teacher in one country and a newspaper data desk in another can use the same chart, with credit, without negotiation.
That openness requires editorial discipline. Because its charts will be republished far from their context, the team writes extensive annotations, definitions and caveats into articles and chart notes. Roser has argued for academics to share knowledge openly for public benefit, and the publication practises that argument at scale — treating clarity about uncertainty and sources as part of the product, not as fine print.
The COVID-19 Datasets
The pandemic transformed Our World in Data from a respected reference into essential global infrastructure. From 2020 it built and maintained a worldwide database on COVID-19 vaccinations that was used as a source by the World Health Organization, researchers, international organisations, journals and numerous newspapers; a parallel global dataset on COVID-19 testing was used by the United Nations, the White House, the WHO and epidemiologists, alongside its data on cases, hospitalisations and excess deaths.
The episode demonstrated the value of the model built over the previous decade: a small Oxford team with mature data pipelines could assemble, clean and publish global figures faster and more transparently than many official channels, and give them away. Media that had previously cited its long-run charts now relied on its daily numbers. The experience expanded both its audience and its staff, and left a lasting template for how it responds when a global data need emerges.
Energy, Environment and Campaigning for Open Data
Alongside health and development, energy and environment form a major strand: data on carbon emissions, energy mixes, renewables and air pollution, much of it developed under Hannah Ritchie's research leadership, connect Our World in Data to the climate cluster elsewhere in this directory. Its energy pages are among the most reused references for how electricity generation is changing by country.
In 2021 the team began campaigning for the International Energy Agency to make the data it collects from national governments publicly available. The campaign is a natural extension of its philosophy: if publicly funded data sit behind paywalls, public understanding suffers. By advocating open data beyond its own platform, the Lab acts as a standards-bearer for the wider ecosystem of global statistics, not only as a publisher competing within it.
Audience and Reach
By the mid-2020s the website reached around 100 million visitors a year and was referred to in more than 50,000 media articles annually, according to the University of Leuven's summary when awarding Roser an honorary doctorate in 2025. Its readers span the general public, students and teachers, academic researchers, journalists and policymakers. Content is written to be intelligible without specialist training while remaining useful to specialists — a dual address that few academic projects achieve.
The SDG Tracker, which Roser also built, extends that reach into official development monitoring by presenting data on all seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. Tools such as the Chartbook of Economic Inequality similarly package research for reuse. Each spin-off applies the same formula — curated open data, clear visualisation, explanatory writing — to a neighbouring need, widening the Lab's syndication footprint.
Funding and the Public-Good Model
Our World in Data is produced as a public good: all work is freely available, funded by grants and donations rather than subscriptions or advertising. Philanthropic support allowed the transition from a one-person project to a professional team, and reader donations contribute to sustaining it. The model aligns incentives with mission — success is measured by use and understanding, not by restricting access — but it also makes the organisation permanently dependent on persuading funders that open knowledge is worth paying for, a case its reach statistics make powerfully.
Recognition has reinforced that case. Beyond the Lovie Award and honorary doctorates for its founder, the publication is routinely cited in major media — Roser's work has appeared in or been used by outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, the Financial Times, Science and Nature. Such citation is both impact and evidence: it shows funders and the university that the Lab's output shapes global discourse on humanity's largest problems.
Digital Presence as the Whole Product
Unlike organisations for which a website supports a service, for Our World in Data the website is the service. Its interactive charts are designed to be explored, embedded and shared; its articles are written for search and for the classroom as much as for the news cycle; and its data downloads serve programmers and researchers who build their own analyses. Social channels distribute new work, but the durable asset is the structured, documented, openly licensed corpus itself.
That corpus compounds. Every dataset added makes the archive more useful; every chart reused in a textbook or newsroom extends its influence without further effort. In the economics of information agencies, this is syndication perfected: produce once, license freely, and let the world distribute. It is why a team of a few dozen in Oxford can inform public debate in countries where it has no staff, no office and no marketing.
Significance
Our World in Data's significance is to have changed expectations of what a data publication can be: academically grounded yet written for everyone, focused on the long run yet indispensable in a fast crisis, and openly licensed yet institutionally sustainable. It has shown that the bottleneck in public understanding of global problems is often not the existence of data but its curation — finding, cleaning, visualising and explaining evidence that was previously scattered across journals and statistical annexes.
Within this directory of UK agencies and intelligence services, it stands at the open extreme of the spectrum, the counterpart to the subscription forecasters and proprietary data firms in the same batch. All of them, in different business models, do the same fundamental work from British bases: turning specialised research into information the rest of the world uses to decide. Our World in Data simply gives its away — and is, by reach, among the most influential publications Britain produces.
