We believe that opening up climate change research and data is climate action. Our Open Climate Data project, generously funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, is facilitating better sharing of climate data with CC licensing, metadata, and database user-interface practices. Our Paper Pledge for the Planet and Unbinding projects focus on opening up the most important published climate change research.

Empowering Institutions: Open Climate Data

There are a range of organizations that collect and publish the world’s largest climate datasets on behalf of national governments, intergovernmental alliances, and/or global populations, including the UN World Meteorological Organization, Group on Earth Observations, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the World Resources Institute.

Collectively addressing climate change means that this climate data must be open, accessible, and easy to use, so more people everywhere can contribute collectively to solutions. We provide comprehensive and transparent guidance in response to the question “What am I allowed to do with this climate data?” for scientists, researchers, policymakers, educators, civil society organizations, advocates, journalists, and others working to understand and address climate change.

Our Work to Date

Landscape Analysis: We surveyed the open climate data landscape to better understand the permissible uses of existing large climate datasets. Alongside climate data publishers from governments, institutions, and organizations around the world, we are also collectively promoting best practices for sharing climate data.

Recommended Best Practices: We collaborated with government and intergovernmental climate agencies  to publish our practical recommended steps for public climate data-producing institutions in choosing the most suitable legal terms and licenses, and using metadata that center the user experience around attribution, licensing, and provenance.

No-Cost Implementation Support: Our recommended best practices provide a baseline for our core work in facilitating the improvement of open data licensing policies, database user-interface practices, and researcher/user education and advocacy. We work directly with climate organizations to provide hands-on training and consultations customized to their needs.

We Can Help

Creative Commons can help your climate organization review and revise your existing data sharing policies, discuss how to maximize compliance with your policy, and provide feedback on any policy-related documents or websites. Our legal team can give feedback, advice, and support your legal team in answering questions about open licensing, public domain, and open data policies. Our training team can facilitate customized workshops to help your program officers, executives, and other staff understand the importance of your open data policy and support the development of in-house expertise on selected elements of copyright and public domain considerations, open licensing, open access, and engagement in open movements. These workshops can be catered to meet host-institution instructional needs, and range from partial day, full-day to multi-day events.

If your organization can benefit from no-cost implementation support, please reach out at info@creativecommons.org.

Empowering Researchers: Paper Pledge for the Planet

We believe that open repositories can be a tool for climate action. By increasing the number of climate research papers available in open repositories, we are collectively taking action by making this research available openly.

Pledges are critical to the success of campaigns and are a meaningful way for individuals and groups to show their support. Instead of raising money or asking for votes, we are raising the awareness of open access as a necessary condition for solving the climate crisis. If you are an author of a climate change research paper, the pledge we are asking you to make is to upload a version of your work, as agreed within the terms of your publishing agreement, to an open repository.

You can check at Share Your Paper what version you can upload and even directly email the permitted version right on the same website. We are also partnering with the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and EIFL for direct outreach to researchers through academic and national institutions.

CC is working with researchers on the Paper Pledge for the Planet because for too long researchers have been disempowered in scholarly communication. Tools like the CC licences allow researchers to control how their work is shared in places like repositories. CC, COAR and EIFL will be releasing updates on the progress of the Paper Pledge here.

 

Open Repositories Conference 2024 Closing Keynote

Empowering Publishers: Unbinding

In 2006, Peter Suber, the Senior Advisor on Open Access at Harvard University, proposed a strategy for ‘unbinding’ past research articles on a subject of urgent public need by making them open access. Recognizing the global importance of removing all barriers to accessing important climate change research, CC is putting into practice an unbinding strategy to open all the papers cited in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. About 40% of these papers are behind a paywall. We are directly appealing to publishers to open up the papers a panel of climate experts have deemed to be some of the most research on climate change.

Publishers can play a key role in making this most important research open and through it take action to solve the climate crisis. As partners CC will provide the data and information about this key literature and celebrate publishers participation and contribution to addressing climate change. The dataset of open papers will also be openly accessible on Zenodo and updated as papers are opened.

 

Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association Conference 2024 Closing Keynote

If you are a publisher interested in participating in the Unbinding project please reach out at info@creativecommons.org.

Join us

We are actively seeking funds to continue the urgent work of opening up access to all climate research. The financial support of foundations, members of the Open Infrastructure Circle, and your donations is essential to us to continue this work. We’d love to chat about how we can work together. Reach out info@creativecommons.org.