How to use Our World in Data

How to use Our World in Data in your presentations, in your writing, and your web articles and blog.

Visualizations and text: All our charts, maps, and text is licensed under a very permissive ‘Creative Commons’ (CC) license: The CC-BY license. The BY stands for ‘by attribution’ and this means you are free to take whatever is useful for your work. You just need to provide credit to Our World in Data and our underlying sources (see below).

Note: In early 2019 we changed our Creative Commons license from “By Attribution-Share Alike” (CC-BY-SA) to “By Attribution” (CC-BY). Some of our static charts still have the CC-BY-SA mark in the bottom right corner. You can disregard this, and consider all our work as licensed under CC-BY.

Software: We develop our own data visualization and database tool: The Our World in Data-Grapher. This tool is completely open source – here on GitHub – and is free to use on any other web publication. The code is licensed under the MIT License.

All our work is licensed under a very permissive ‘Creative Commons’ license. This means you are free to take whatever is useful for your work from www.OurWorldInData.org.

This applies to all work done by us, all text and all visualizations with our logo on them.

[At times we reproduce graphics from other sources, it is clearly stated when it is the case, and in those cases the copyright remains with the original authors and we can’t give any permissions for reproduction.]

We do ask however that whenever you use our work for a publication, you stick to the following guidelines:

1. 1. Cite the corresponding entry from Our World in Data where the original content is located. For example: Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2019) – “Global Rise of Education”. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://ourworldindata.org/global-rise-of-education’ [Online Resource]
   2. Make sure you add links and cite underlying data sources. For example, if you are redrawing a chart from Our World in Data for which we cite an external data source, then you should cite both Our World in Data and this underlying source.
   3. If you can, send us a quick note telling us where you used our work. It is encouraging to hear our work is helpful and we can learn from seeing how you used it.
   4. In online publications embed interactive charts when possible. We encourage online publications to embed our interactive charts. This is easy to do and you can trust us that the embedded chart won’t break – all our links are stable.

The normal case – save as an image: It is straightforward to make static versions of Our World in Data visualizations. Just click the downward arrow below the visualization and then chose ‘PNG’. Try it out on the map below.

In case you need to edit the chart further: Click on SVG and the chart will open as a Scalable Vector Graphic (.svg) file in a new tab in your browser. You can then save it in your browser – through “save page as” – and you will have a vector graphic of the chart that you can then edit in Inkscape (free), Adobe Illustrator or similar software.

For a step-by-step explanation with examples, see here.

You can use any of the interactive visualizations from Our World In Data in your articles.

Here are three recent examples of articles that embed OWID visualizations:

– Politifact using OurWorldInData in fact checking claims about global poverty.

– The Brazilian website o futuro das coisas in an article about the future of global education.

– Vox.com in an article on the decline of global malaria deaths on World Malaria Day.

An example:

For example let’s assume you want to write about fertility and on the fertility page you find this map that you want to embed in your own article:

All you have to do to embed it in your article:

At the bottom of the chart you click on the little share symbol (one dot that connects to two dots) and then you can chose the  >Embed option and you will see a box popping up (try it!) with the following bit of text:

Now you just take this bit of html code and place it in the text of your own article.

An iframe is used to display a website within another website (w3schools has more info on iframes.) Similar to when you embed a YouTube video in your article, your article now embeds an Our World In Data visualization.

Change the map focus or change the year:

We try to make the embed tool as useful as possible: For example, you can focus on Africa instead of World in the map above; and you can move the time slider to 2015 (you will get this). Now when you click on > Embed you get the following bit of code:

If you copy-paste this code your article will embed the map with a focus on Africa and the fertility rate for 2015.

And the same works for the chart view. Just switch to Chart in the visualization above and add the countries that you are interested in – like this. When you click on > Embed you can now get the code to embed this line chart. And if you want to select different countries that are shown in your embedded chart then just chose the option ‘ Add country ’ at the bottom of the chart and will have these countries shown in your chart.