This week marks the fifteenth year of International Open Access Week (24-30 October) with this year’s theme being ‘Open for Climate Justice’. Dedicated to raising awareness of the benefits of open access publishing, it’s an opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around how open can be a means for climate justice.
We spoke to two of our Earth and Environmental Sciences Community Gateway Advisors, Dr Olivier Pourret, Associate Professor in Geochemistry at UniLaSalle, and Dr Win Cowger, Environmental Scientist at the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research, to get their thoughts on how open access (OA) publishing can contribute to climate justice.
Why is OA important for climate justice or responding to climate change more broadly?
Dr Win Cowger: Climate change and climate injustice are some of the most challenging topics of today. We need more new knowledge to make headway on these issues. I believe that open access research is a catalyst for advancing knowledge that will allow us to be successful in advancing justice and reducing our negative impacts on the climate.
Dr Olivier Pourret: Climate justice is an explicit acknowledgement that the climate crisis has far-reaching effects, and the impacts are not felt equally. These power imbalances affect communities’ abilities to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge around the climate crisis. Openness can create pathways to fairer knowledge sharing and serves as a means to address the imbalances that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them.
How can researchers use OA to respond to problems with climate justice?
Dr Olivier Pourret: Sharing knowledge is a human right and tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries. Open access implies free and unrestricted access to and re-use of research articles and associated data. Recently, OA publishing has seen a new wave of interest, debate, and practices surrounding that mode of publishing.
The inclusion of global data and international community engagement are key to tackling grand challenges. Recent technological advances and growing open access information across the world have enabled global collaborations to some extent. However, there are several barriers that remain, ranging from technical to organizational to cultural, that prevent the advancement of interoperability and tangible scientific progress, see for example in Biogeosciences.
The rise in open access publishing has potential implications for researchers by shifting article-processing charges from organizations to individuals. Take Earth Sciences as an example, until this research community decides to move away from journal-based criteria to evaluate researchers, it is likely that such high costs will continue to cause financial imbalances within this research community, especially to the disadvantage of researchers from the least developed countries.
However, earth scientists, by opting for legal self-archiving of their publications, or publishing in Diamond open access journals (with no fees, like Open Research Europe) could help to promote fair and sustainable access to, and wider dissemination of, their work.
Open Access Week is a time to remind authors that they do not need to pay any article processing charge to publish open access. You can explore my perspective on this issue further here.
How does Open Research Europe support best practice in OA?
Dr Win Cowger: Much research today remains closed or behind paywalls, but researchers have many tools at their disposal to remedy this problem. Many journals allow for sharing manuscripts on personal websites even if they are behind a paywall, whilst other journals allow for the sharing of preprints. Better yet, researchers can refuse to publish in any journal that isn’t open access!
Journals like Open Research Europe remove the financial barriers to publishing OA for researchers. Diamond open access journals are available in many fields and supported fully by volunteer efforts by researchers. Data and code sharing is already free of charge and thoroughly documented data sharing standards are available for most fields. Many of us are working toward a future where researchers are judged by the impact of their work to society (e.g., Open Access, Open Data, Open Code, Open Science) before they are judged based on the impact of the work to their personal merit (e.g., impact factor, fewer authors, first authorships, closed data). The options are available, but we researchers are the ones who need to take the step to make it happen.
