2024:Program/Open as a Prerequisite for Solving the Climate Crisis

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Session title: Open as a Prerequisite for Solving the Climate Crisis

Session type: Panel

Track: Research

Language: en

Join this session to hear from organizations who are collaborating on projects and initiatives to profile the role of open in addressing the climate crisis. We will profile successes to date, highlight upcoming projects, and invite participation in our community-driven Open Goes COP movement.

We believe that open access to climate change research will enable faster and more equitable solutions to the most pressing issues of our time: climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Our panel will provide a case study of enabling global open access policies and highlight our experimentations in making seminal climate research open access.

Description

Since 2022, Creative Commons, SPARC, and EIFL have been collaborating to bring a discipline-specific approach to open access (OA) focus at the intersection of OA and the climate crisis. Since witnessing the power of OA to research that was evidenced during the COVID-19 crisis where publishers opened up access to COVID-19-related research with the goal of collaborating on the development of a vaccine, it is clear that OA has a role to play when it comes to collaborating to solve the world's greatest challenges. Supported by a multidisciplinary steering committee, Creative Commons, SPARC, and EIFL launched the Open Climate Campaign with funding from Arcadia. After two years of the Campaign, we have created the foundation and a proof of concept for increasing OA of climate research and contributing to our ambitious goal to see all climate change and biodiversity research available as immediate open access.

During this panel, the speakers will outline how the Campaign created a model and acted as a catalyst for: - Increasing equitable collaboration in finding faster solutions to the climate crisis; - Contributing to a robust open knowledge commons which helps to address the information crisis, fight dis/misinformation, and better inform policy making; - Accelerating the systemic shift in scholarly communications that is sustainable, equitable, and community-driven.

This panel will also highlight our efforts and success to date as we facilitated cooperation and coordination at the intersection of the open access and climate change movements. By focusing on removing policy and legal barriers to the accessibility of climate change research, our Campaign accelerated the shift to open access for all climate change and biodiversity research, while also providing a case study and framework for future campaigns. We will also provide an outline of various initiatives: Unbinding and the Paper Pledge for the Planet that will be launching this fall, as well as Creative Commons' Open Climate Data Project.

This session will also be a call to action in preparation for COP29 as we support the development of the 'Open goes COP' movement, bringing together organizations and individuals who advocating for open access to be included within COP negotiations as a necessary condition to solving the climate crisis equitably. We hope to also highlight themes for community advocacy at COP and collaborate with the Wikimedia community in calling for research as a public good.

Open access is a necessary condition for solving the climate crisis. Without global climate solutions built on open and transparent research and data, we risk running out of time.

Session recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/b0W8f4nhdh8?feature=shared&t=23591

How does your session relate to the event theme, Collaboration of the Open?

As evidenced during the onset of the COVID-19, a normally guarded community accustomed to holding their data and research papers close, began to adopt much more open practices. Researchers came in droves to preprint servers to post versions of their research papers – that had not yet been peer reviewed – to make their work freely and publicly available. New data repositories (https://health.google.com/covid-19/open-data/) emerged and pledges (Wellcome (https://wellcome.org/press-release/sharing-research-data-and-findings-relevant-novel-coronavirus-ncov-outbreak), Chief Science Advisors (https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/office-chief-science-advisor/initiatives-covid-19/call-open-access-covid-19-publications)) to make research open were signed. This demonstrable change in behavior was due to the recognition, including public and political pressure, that COVID-19 was a global threat to humanity. Biologists, geneticists, statisticians and others in biomedical fields came together to share their work; they realized in order to develop COVID-19 treatments and vaccines, the knowledge about the virus needed to be open and shared rapidly.

Taking inspiration from this global collaboration of open, the Open Climate Campaign advocates for the same actions to be taken to solve the climate crisis. Creative Commons, SPARC, EIFL, and members of the Open Climate Campaign steering committee believe that open access to climate change and biodiversity research will enable faster and more equitable solutions to the most pressing issues of our time: climate change and the loss of biodiversity. The goal of our session is to bring together other community members and share resources and build capacity for advocating for open access to climate change research so that we may collaborate in meeting this prerequisite for finding a solution to the climate crisis.

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

Everyone can participate in this session

Resources

• https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BkfuSmRT42STbGhfTjG5-JwhE0fTnTY8jcUGeFroGME/edit#slide=id.g2f0705a472a_0_0
• https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iqhEuBcniA_Rzg1Qg89tkPOYwW7rNKzU9VF8_DZDuAg/edit?usp=sharing
• https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qUFVeTEEMHCV0jlOthmaSdDH4QZIq_m0eZB2ssNVvX4/edit?usp=sharing
• https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zU9uuf8uOwU2fWH-FrUvjpKU1llrdlTCVT3o7U7offU/edit?usp=sharing

Speakers

• Rebecca Ross

Rebecca is the Communications Manager for the Open Climate Campaign, a campaign that aims to increase equitable collaboration in finding faster solutions to the climate crisis through open access.

Prior to joining Creative Commons, Rebecca led the strategy and engagement portfolios at a national academic library association. She has also held executive communication roles within the academic publishing and open infrastructure sectors. Rebecca has been leading open access initiatives for over ten years and has had the opportunity to contribute to the growth of open access not-for-profit publishing and library strategic investments in open. Rebecca is a trained librarian with a MIS from the University of Ottawa.

Rebecca lives in the forest in Chelsea, Quebec, Canada with her partner and two dogs, Henry and Daphne, and is an avid hiker, reader, and meditator.

• Jan Ainali

Jan Ainali started editing in 2006 and is an administrator on Swedish Wikipedia. He helped found the Swedish chapter and later became part of the board, the chair person and the first Executive Director. Just before Wikimania in Stockholm, he became co-host of the podcast Wikipediapodden and has now recorded over 200 episodes. In 2019, he co-founded the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development. Together with User:Abbe98, he has made over 100 livestreamed Wikidata editing sessions. For work, he runs a consultancy: Open By Default.

• Melissa Hagemann

Melissa has been a leader of the Access to Knowledge movement for over twenty years. She managed the Open Society Institute’s (now Open Society Foundations) work to define Open Access through the Budapest Open Access Initiative and went on to support the development of the global Open Access movement. To mark the 20th anniversary of the BOAI, she spearheaded the development of new recommendations which emphasize that Open Access is not an end in itself, but a means to further ends, above all, to the equity, quality, sustainability, and usability of research.

Melissa served as a member of the WMF’s Advisory Board and WMF’s

Selection Committee for Executive Director and Board of Trustees.

• Lucas Pretti

Lucas Pretti is a Brazilian journalist, art worker, activist and researcher. He has been a free culture advocate for over twenty years and has been involved in a wide range of commons-based initiatives fighting for power distribution and people's participation in decision-making.

He is currently the Communications & Advocacy Director at the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), from where he co-leads Open Goes COP, a coalition advocating for openness at the UN Climate Change Conferences.

He is also a PhD candidate in Arts, Literature and Cultural Studies at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). His academic focus is on tracking and promoting commons-based practices among socially engaged communities, with a particular attention to horizontal governance models and emerging organisational aesthetics from the Global South.

• Maxwell Beganim

An Ecosystems builder, educator and technology Enthusiast. He is the cofounder of the Wiki Green Initiative, Executive Manager of Open Knowledge Ghana,Co founder of the Ghanaian Language Wikimedia Community and Pidgin Community, He is currently the Africa Coordinator (Anglophone) for Open Knowledge Network.Maxwell is a associate consultant on Open Education and Environmental Sustainability , and Co leads the Open Goes COP global coalition.