https://grid.acIt's a free, entirely manually curated, database of research organisations around the world with associated metadata and other linked IDs (wikidata/geonames/NUTS/crossref/fundref/ucas/ukprn...). Everything has a persistent ID so it doesn't matter if a university changes name.
It's awesome because this is the kind of thing you assume exists but actually doesn't, and is really quite hard to build yourself. If you want to aggregate data from multiple sources you need IDs. We built it because that's what we do and it's what we need. Then we released it CC-BY :)
It's not glamorous, but I think it's pretty important. It lets you analyse things far more easily than you would have been able to do before. I wrote a blogpost about pay in universities vs regional averages in the UK [0] and the analysis itself was really just a case of joining a few things together.
On the business side of things, we work with people to get their data cleaned up & linked to GRID as well as offering other bits with . Please do get in touch if you either want some help using it or just want to talk about these kinds of things :) i.calvert@digital-science.com
[0] https://www.digital-science.com/blog/tech/north-south-divide...
Edit - We're continually adding stuff, so get in touch if you think something is missing or incorrect, you can raise a ticket here: http://gridac.freshdesk.com
We tend to release once a month, so it might be a few weeks before you see the fix go out.