Opening Access to Knowledge to Accelerate Climate Action

 The nature of the climate crisis, and the unprecedented speed with which the world needs to address it, requires global, national, and local actions that are informed by the latest research from multiple disciplines. However, like a lot of academic research, the majority of climate change research is locked behind the paywall of one a handful of big academic publishers, often limiting how it can be applied to the wicked problem of climate change.  

My guest today is working to change this. For the past several years, Dr. Monica Granados has been leading the Open Climate Campaign, a global effort by the nonprofit Creative Commons,  to promote open access to climate research in order to "accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity. " According to the Open Climate Campaign, to solve the global challenge of climate change, “ knowledge about climate--research, data, educational resources, software--  must be open.”

Monica and I discuss what open access is, the truly messed up grift that is academic publishing, resources faculty who are interested in sharing their research can use to make their work openly accessible, and future directions for the open climate campaign.

Guest Bio
Dr. Monica Granados has a PhD in ecology from McGill University. While working on her PhD, Monica discovered incentives in academia promote practices that make knowledge less accessible and has since devoted her career to working in the open science space in pursuit of making knowledge more equitable and accessible. She has worked on open knowledge initiatives with Mozilla, PREreview and the Government of Canada. Monica is now an Assistant Director at Creative Commons working on the Open Climate Campaign promoting open access of climate and biodiversity research.

Show Notes
Creative Commons website
Open Climate Campaign website
Nelson Memo
Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (Helios)

Climate.edu is written and produced by Richard Sebastian. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. The Climate.edu theme song "Serious Business (CC-BY- NC) was written, performed, and openly licensed by Serge Quadrado. Check out all of his music on his page on the Free Music Archive.

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