Celebrating Open Access Week 2022: Open for Climate Justice

The theme of OA Week is “Open for Climate Justice”. As described on the international Open Access Week website:

Climate Justice is an explicit acknowledgement that the climate crisis has far-reaching effects, and the impacts are “not be[ing] borne equally or fairly, between rich and poor, women and men, and older and younger generations,” as the UN notes. These power imbalances also affect communities’ abilities to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge around the climate crisis. Openness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities currently shaping the impacts of climate change, and how we’re responding to them.

This year’s focus on Climate Justice seeks to encourage connection and collaboration among the climate movement and the international open community. Sharing knowledge is a human right, and tackling the climate crisis requires exchanging knowledge rapidly across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries while minimizing barriers to this vital collaboration.

Local Events

Friday, October 28 from 12-1 pm ET Drop in on Mark Swartz, Scholarly Publishing Librarian and Jane Reeves, Reference Assistant (Digital Initiatives and Open Scholarship) to talk about the various OA services and supports available through Queen’s University Library. Bring questions about anything OA related, including:

• The library publishing services including QSpace: Queen's Scholarship & Digital Collections and Open Journals @ Queen's.

• Compliance with Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications,

• Predatory Publishers and Conferences

• Copyright and your rights as an author, and

• How to distinguish yourself with an ORCiD.

Click here to join the meeting on Friday, October 28 from 12-1 ET.

Event Highlights from around the world

In support of this theme, there are a wide range of events happening around the world. You can find a full list on the OA week events page.

• Open for Climate Justice: To Solve the World’s Biggest Problems We Need the Knowledge About Them to Be Open (October 24 from 2-3)
• Open to Change: Possibilities and Probabilities (October 24 from 4-5)
• How to Find Hope in a Climate Crisis - A talk by author, poet and activist Matt Sowerby (October 25^th from 7-8 am)
• Lowering the Barriers to Climate Research: Climate Change and OA Books (October 25 from 10-11)
• Think Global: Act Local - Ensuring an Equitable Transition to Open Science (October 25 from 12-1)
• Celebrate Open Access Week with ORCID (October 25 from 2-3)
• Open for (Climate) Justice - Ouvert pour la justice (climatique) (October 26 from 7-8 pm)
   

Further Reading

OA Climate Books

• Howarth, C., Lane, M., & Slevin, A. (2022). Addressing the climate crisis. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Armstrong, A. et al. (2018). Communicating climate change: a guide for educators. Cornell University Press.
• Tognetti, R., Smith, M., & Panzacchi, P. (2022). Climate-smart forestry in mountain regions. Springer.
• Ely, Adrian. (2021). Transformative pathways to sustainability: learning across disciplines, cultures, and contexts. Routledge.

OA Climate Journals

PKP is a multi-university initiative developing (free) Open Source software and conducting research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing. For Open Access Week, PKP have highlighted a collection of climate-related open scholarship published using PKP’s open-source publishing platforms. 

Examples of OA Climate related journals:

• Conservation & Society
• Climate
• Climate Change Ecology
• Oxford Open Climate Change
• Climate Risk Management

For assistance locating more open access journals, contact your subject librarian.

Open Data

• Climate Atlas of Canada (includes sections on climate action and Indigenous knowledge and climate change)
• Climatedata.ca – A collaboration between Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), the Computer Research Institute of Montréal (CRIM), Ouranos, the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC), the Prairie Climate Centre (PCC), and HabitatSeven.
• Environment and Climate Change Canada - Informs Canadians about protecting and conserving our natural heritage, and ensuring a clean, safe and sustainable environment for present and future generations.
  • Climate data portals
• Climate related results from FRDR – A federated platform for digital research data management and discovery. 
• World Bank Climate Change Knowledge Portal (Canada)
• Community Climate Hub – An initiative that collects climate data from cities across Canada.
• Socio-Economic, Physical, Housing, Eviction, and Risk dataset (SEPHER) 2.0
• Environmental Justice at NASA
• Open-Up Guide: Using Open Data to Advance Climate Action – A report about using data open data for climate justice purposes.
• U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Dataset Gateway
• Open Environmental Data Project
• Environmental Data & Governance Initiative – A project that helps to ensure open environmental and climate data in the U.S.
• Intersections of Digital Rights and Environmental and Climate Justice - An interesting article that talks about digital rights, open data, and climate justice. More in-depth information.
• Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool