Borealis

Store, share, publish and discover research data!

Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, is a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository, supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada. Borealis supports open discovery, management, sharing, and preservation of Canadian research data.

Learn more about the service, our partners, and our name change.

Partner Libraries

The following institutions and research organizations participate in the Borealis service. Select the institution below to find the associated collection and deposit your data.

Support for Borealis is provided by academic libraries, regional library consortia, universities, colleges, research organizations, and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. The shared technical infrastructure is hosted by Scholars Portal and the University of Toronto Libraries in partnership with regional academic library consortia. Previously funded through projects from CANARIE, Compute Ontario, and the former Portage Network (Canadian Association of Research Libraries).

Borealis is based on the open-source Dataverse software, with development led by the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Features

Why use Borealis?
  • Secure, Canadian Storage

    Borealis datasets are stored on Canadian servers at the University of Toronto Libraries with storage on the Ontario Library Research Cloud, a private, geographically-distributed cloud storage network built with partner universities.

  • Persistent Identifiers

    Every dataset is automatically assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) provided by DataCite Canada to allow research data to be accessible and citable and to help increase the impact of your research. Include your ORCID identifier to link your data to your online scholarly record.

  • Discoverability

    Borealis participates in open harvesting of metadata, which means public datasets are discoverable through tools such as Lunaris, Canada’s national research data discovery service, and Google Dataset Search.

  • Control Access

    Share your data openly or apply granular file-level permissions. Customize your data’s terms of use. Collaborate with your research team and track changes through versioning.

  • Visualization Tools

    Preview and explore data all within your browser. The Data Explorer allows you to explore variables and view summary statistics for tabular files (e.g., Stata, SPSS, R, Excel).

  • Collections for Institutions and Organizations

    Receive support from your local library, institution or research organization and deposit data within affiliated collections.

  • Preservation

    All datasets receive monthly integrity checks in combination with safe storage to protect against data loss and corruption, as outlined in our Preservation Plan.

Discover Research in Borealis

How is Borealis being used?

  • 5,038 datasets published in 2022.
  • 384,620 data files deposited from over 20,442 datasets across 1,390 collections covering multiple disciplines.
  • 1,782 datasets have direct links to publications and other scholarly outputs. View open access research publications connected to data deposited in Borealis.

Research use cases

Agri-Environmental Research Data

Agri-Environmental Research Data

Agricultural and environmental data

Angus Reid Institute

Angus Reid Institute

Research and Opinion Polls

Canadian Journal of Economics

Canadian Journal of Economics

Datasets supporting journal publications

COVID-19 Data

COVID-19 Data

Canadian COVID-19 data deposited in Borealis

Social Media Lab

Social Media Lab

Interdisciplinary social media research

Web Archives for Historical Research

Web Archives for Historical Research

Linking history and big data

News

Contact us

Questions about our service? Find your institution or organization in the Partners list and click “Contact” on the institutional collection page, or use the contact form below to contact the Borealis team.

For more information about using the service visit our About page and User Guide.