Open for Climate Justice

Please enjoy this guest post from our Judy Rabinowitz, our Scholarly Communication Librarian

October 24^th-30^th, we celebrate Open Access Week, a time to focus on what we can do to improve how scholarly research is shared, utilized, and discovered.  Open Access (OA), at its core, makes research literature freely available on the Internet with few copyright or license restriction.  This year’s theme, “Open for Climate Justice,” highlights the power open access can have on boosting innovation, discovery, and improvements in our world.

As SPARC, a non-profit open access advocacy group, notes, “Openness 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.”  As a globally pervasive issue, the climate crisis demands the unbarred and swift exchange of information and data across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries in order to tackle it comprehensively, which open access can facilitate.

And, we can choose to ensure open access is the norm in scholarly publishing.  We can publish our research in open access journals, become peer reviewers in open access publications, and advocate and promote with our colleagues and networks effective and equitable OA business models, such as those that utilize low or no article processing charges and have no embargoes on contents.

Ask Us how you can do more for open access.  Happy Open Access Week!