Quebec research data: Lunaris, Borealis, FRDR and university repositories
Discover datasets produced by Canadian universities and research organizations, then verify whether they can actually be reused before integrating them into a project.
A significant amount of useful Canadian data is published outside government portals. Universities, research centres, scientific networks and independent organizations deposit datasets in national research infrastructures. Atlas uses these repositories as discovery engines, but never assumes that a publicly downloadable file is automatically licensed for republication.
Lunaris
The main starting point: a national multidisciplinary metadata index harvesting more than 100 Canadian repositories and collections. A Lunaris record should lead back to the original repository and its terms.
UniversitiesBorealis
A Dataverse infrastructure used by many Canadian institutions. Public datasets can be accessible through APIs, but each dataset retains its own licence and conditions.
Large datasetsFRDR
Canada's Federated Research Data Repository, designed in part for large research datasets. Deposits receive persistent identifiers and are discoverable through Lunaris and other indexes.
NorthPolar Data Catalogue
Especially useful for Nunavik research on permafrost, snow, ice, hydrology, environment, wildlife and community research. Its commercial-use terms require additional caution.
The Atlas filter: licence before download
Green — integration candidate: explicit CC0, CC BY, public domain or an open-government licence compatible with commercial reuse. Atlas still checks the dataset notes before republishing anything.
Yellow — manual review: Custom Terms, missing or unclear licences, institutional terms, or a contradiction between the structured licence field and free-text conditions. A dataset may remain useful as a link without being mirrored.
Red — no mirroring: CC BY-NC, non-commercial, personal/academic-only use, restricted access, redistribution prohibitions, or insufficiently aggregated personal/sensitive information.
How Atlas rejects weak candidates
A university dataset is not automatically better because it is newer or more detailed. Atlas first removes copies of government datasets already integrated from a more authoritative source. DOIs, persistent identifiers, canonical URLs, normalized titles, authors and years are used for deduplication.
Remaining candidates are scored on Quebec specificity, novelty versus the 91 Atlas products, licence clarity and commercial compatibility, machine readability, freshness, public usefulness and operational fit for the small collector.
Priority searches
Discovery is broader than the single keyword “Quebec”. Atlas also targets Nunavik, St. Lawrence, Gaspésie, Côte-Nord, Abitibi, Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, Laurentides, Outaouais, Estrie and Mauricie, together with topics such as permafrost, flooding, water, biodiversity, forests, climate, soils, transportation, housing and energy.
Explore datasets already integrated into Atlas →