We believe that opening up climate change research and data is climate action. Open data is central to accelerating scientific progress because it allows researchers everywhere to freely access, verify, combine, and build upon existing data without legal or technical barriers, dramatically increasing the speed, scale, and collaboration of discovery. Our Open Climate Data project, generously funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, facilitated better sharing of climate data with CC licensing, metadata, and database user-interface practices to help build upon climate science across the globe.

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. 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. As part of the Open Climate Data project, we provided comprehensive and transparent guidance on sharing climate data for scientists, researchers, policymakers, educators, civil society organizations, advocates, journalists, and others working to understand and address climate change.

Our Work

We began by surveying the open climate data landscape to better understand the permissible uses of existing large climate datasets. Then, collaborating with government and intergovernmental climate agencies around the world, including the UN World Meteorological Organization, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and more, we published practical recommendations 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.

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. To further promote and facilitate these best practices, we worked directly with climate organizations to provide hands-on training and consultations customized to their needs.

As implementation increased with our Open Data Project partners, it became clear that across scientific domains, data producers, hosts, researchers, and institutions, there existed the same barriers: uncertainty about licensing, inconsistent metadata, unclear provenance, and friction in reuse, which result in less reuse and licenses being ignored by researchers. The Open Climate Data project was spent supporting data producers around the world with implementation of the recommendations across their policies, platforms, and practices. This work revealed a more universal need for practical, legally sound, and interoperable data sharing practices that are not limited to just climate data, in order to maximize open data sharing for other types of scientific data that are also intended to be made publicly available. The recommended metadata values for source link, license link, attribution statement, and rights were generally applicable as well. 

Because of the ongoing collaboration in testing and refining open data licensing practices with data producing organizations, we were able to further strengthen the recommendations in such a way that they are applicable across scientific disciplines.

Recommendations

For a summary of our recommended best practices for the sharing of scientific data, view our summary report.

Resources

Read our report Licensing Best Practices for Sharing Scientific Data.

Get Involved

Fund This Work

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.

Work With Our Team

From revising your existing data sharing policies, to answering questions about open licensing, to providing customized workshops to help your staff understand the importance of your open data policy, Creative Commons can help your climate organization strengthen your infrastructure for the open sharing of data. If your organization can benefit from open climate data implementation support through CC consulting, please reach out at learning@creativecommons.org.

Funder Acknowledgment

Thank you to the generous support of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation for funding the Open Climate Data project.