Open for climate justice
This year for International Open Access Week, two movements have merged—climate justice and open access.
Climate justice is a movement acknowledging the unequal effects of climate change among global communities. Open access is a movement addressing the inequitable exchange of knowledge with these same communities.
Open for Climate Justice, the Week’s theme for 2022, recognizes that “[o]penness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them.”
For Dr. Allyson Menzies, a wildlife biologist with the University of Guelph, the theme sparks a reminder: science is a public good. “It’s a question of who science is there to serve,” she says. “I think scientists sometimes forget that, in many cases, we are the people generating knowledge for society, and we shouldn’t take that lightly. For me, part of that means ensuring that the information I produce is available to everyone.”
From fisheries management to impacts on milk production and plant phenology, the volume and breadth of open access research on climate change are tremendous. In Canada, this research is heavily funded by public money. For that reason alone, “the work needs to be publicly accessible,” says Dr. Andrea Bryndum-Buchholz , a marine biologist and climate-impact researcher with Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.
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Read the full story at Canadian Science Publishing.