Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL Announce a New 4-year, $4-Million (USD) Grant from Arcadia Fund to Fund the “Open Climate Campaign”

From a Joint News Release (via CC):

Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL today announce a new 4-year, $4-million (USD) grant from Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to fund the Open Climate Campaign.

This grant, which builds on $450,000 (USD) in planning funds from the Open Society Foundations, will fund a four-year campaign to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity by promoting open access to research.

“While the reality of climate change and the resulting loss of biodiversity is certain, the research about these global challenges and the possible actions to tackle them are too often not publicly accessible. In order to solve these pressing problems, the knowledge about them must be made immediately and freely open to all,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director at SPARC.

“The Campaign has assembled experts from across the fields of climate change, biodiversity, open science, scholarly publishing and open education to develop a campaign that we believe will lead to the open sharing of research outputs as the norm for researchers, governments, funders and environmental organizations,” said Rima Kupryte, Director at Electronic Information for Libraries.

The Campaign will:

• Bring attention to the issue of access to knowledge on climate change and biodiversity.
• Work directly with national governments, funders and environmental organizations to create open access policies and make it easier to share their climate change content.
• Identify, engage and contribute to draft international frameworks to include open access policy recommendations.
• Identify important existing climate and biodiversity research publications not already open access and help them move to open access where possible. We will also explore tactics to facilitate changes in publisher actions to ensure climate and biodiversity research is open access.
• Engage with researchers, universities and policy makers in traditionally excluded geographical regions to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.

“Climate change is the most pressing global challenge facing humanity. When research and data are closed behind paywalls and people are excluded from the conversation, progress is stifled and we all lose out. This campaign will ensure inclusive, just and equitable access to the essential knowledge we will all need to fight the climate crisis,” said Catherine Stihler, CEO at Creative Commons.

“OSF is thrilled to partner with the Arcadia Fund to support Creative Commons, SPARC, and EIFL, global leaders of the open access movement, to launch the Open Climate Campaign. The quick response from the international research and publishing communities to make all research on COVID-19, and now monkeypox, openly available, demonstrates that to properly address the world’s greatest challenges, research needs to be open. OSF has called for all research to be made openly available, since we helped to define open access to research twenty years ago. I believe the Open Climate Campaign will serve as a model for opening research in other critical fields,” said Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer at the Open Society Foundations.

Direct to Complete News Release

More in this CC Blog Post:

When knowledge about climate change and biodiversity is not freely and openly available to all, only part of humanity is able to help build on that knowledge. When only some people are able to contribute to that knowledge, new insights and possible solutions are missing. When the data that supports research is inaccessible, scientists cannot fully assess or replicate results. Addressing a challenge as dramatic as the climate crisis and its effects on global biodiversity will require that everything we know is available to everyone to understand and augment. The Campaign will go beyond just sharing climate and biodiversity knowledge, to expand the inclusive, just and equitable knowledge policies and practices that enable better sharing.

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Direct to Open Climate Campaign Website

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing