WDS is excited to announce a new endorsement of the Open Climate Campaign.

 World Data System, 4 April 2024 — World Data System is proud to join international organizations and open access advocates to endorse and promote the Open Climate Campaign. To make open sharing of research outputs the norm in climate science, Creative Commons, SPARC, and EIFL launched a 4-year Open Climate Campaign in August 2022 with funding from Arcadia, which built on planning funds from the Open Society Foundations. Climate change, and the resulting harm to our global biodiversity, is one of the world’s most pressing challenges. While the existence of climate change and the resulting loss of biodiversity is certain, knowledge and data about these global challenges and the possible solutions, mitigations, and actions to tackle them were too often not publicly accessible.

The WDS, alongside many researchers, governments, and global environmental organizations recognizes the importance of sharing research openly to accelerate progress in combating climate change through facilitating effective knowledge sharing and collaboration across disciplinary and geographic borders.

This global Open Climate Campaign is currently operating under the following goals:

• 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.

One way of contributing is to encourage our members and partners to participate in the campaign when the opportunity arises. Make sure to share with WDS if you engage so we can also highlight your efforts. WDS will also contribute by sharing information on the Open Climate Campaign on social media and also host at least one webinar per year on data and the Open Climate Campaign on how to identify progressive actions in climate conversations. If you have suggestions on upcoming topics or events, please contact wds-ipo@utk.edu.

To learn more about the Open Climate Campaign or to connect, please visit the Open Climate Campaign website. We encourage members to subscribe to the campaign newsletter for future updates here.