With Open Access Week 2022 right around the corner, we were excited to learn that this year’s topic was Climate Justice.

From the Open Access Week website,

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 the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries.

With such an important theme, we here at the blog felt that it was important to try and devote time to addressing different elements of the topic. Because climate justice is a term that explains, not just climate change, but also the social and political issues that go along with it, people often get involved in unexpected ways.

Open Access Week 2022: Climate Justice

The goal behind focusing on climate justice this year is a simple one. The sharing of knowledge is a human right. Because of the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic, and disciplinary boundaries that is needed address the climate crisis, we all benefit from open access.

About International Open Access Week 2022

As explained by their website, “International Open Access Week is organized by SPARC in partnership with the Open Access Week Advisory Committee. It was founded in 2008 by SPARC and partners in the student community.” And at MDPI, we support open access and this initiative as it is central to our core guiding principles. Naturally, support Open Access Week 2022 as well and strongly believe in their goals. Here is what International Open Access Week tells us about the event:

Open Access Week is an invaluable chance to connect the global momentum toward the open sharing of knowledge with the advancement of policy changes and the importance of social issues affecting people around the world. The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions, and organizations around the world, and its organization is led by a global advisory committee. The official hashtag of Open Access Week is #OAweek.

What is open access?

Before getting into how open access can have an impact on things like climate justice, it’s important to understand what open access is.

Katherine Bosworth goes into more detail about the different types of publishing models that exist in open access, primarily looking at gold and green forms of open access. Because there are different types, we try to clarify how we approach it. With the aim of being transparent, we believe that information about these different forms of open access is available can help inform authors’ decisions about how and where they should publish.

In keeping with this, you can read more about MDPI and transparency in open access. There, we go back to the comparison of subscription publishers versus open access publishers and present as much information as we can on the matter.

Profiling Books about Global Collapse

In a very interesting interview, we had an opportunity to sit down and talk to Gaya Herrington is Vice President of Schneider Electrical Global, a specialist company in energy management. In her fascinating book, “5 Insights to Avoid Global Collapse”, she talks about how we can all come together to create systemic change.

Her latest book release with MDPI updates her research with the latest empirical data. Along with this exclusive research update, her book also contains a more in-depth discussion about what her findings indicate for future global developments. Importantly, the book identifies which systemic changes we can still make, for a better tomorrow. For example, recognising that growth is not a good goal, and is the cause of society’s problems.

In her book she addresses different things that we can do implement changes in our lives to help.

Climate Justice as the theme of OA week

How can open access help with climate justice?

Climate justice needs a strong protective stance against environmental damage. This means reducing fossil fuel consumption and consumption in general. We also need to be more mindful of how climate change will affect different people in society. Those with fewer means and more time ahead of them, i.e., younger generations, are more at risk.

But, research can help to curb these effects. Scientific research investigates issues and helps us to learn more about the world around us.

Climate Justice in the Global South

How does open access affect different areas of the globe? Nat Kelly looks into this important issue.

A topic that has gained relevance in recent years has been the disparity in how climate change affects different countries. Poorer countries often have to face a disproportionate set of consequences from climate change. In addition, they often have less resources to handle them, leaving many communities at great risk.

Open access research is crucial in the fight for climate justice. It provides poorer governments and communities with data that can inform their decision and policy making and better prepare them for the problems they will face in the future. Facilitating global collaboration between researchers, in turn, will provide more climate data to improve future efforts.

Climate Justice and citizen science and open access

Daniella Maritan-Thomson notes that citizen science can have a lot of power and use in big global projects. Fitting the theme of Open Access Week 2022, it can draw attention to important topics, such as climate justice, and create a broad sense of awareness on a subject.

Citizen Science in Indonesia

One example that she covers in her article is a project that involves citizen science participation in natural resource management. The aims of this Indonesian study is to restore degraded land to its natural soil base following years of tin mining. In trying to repair soil nutrients and making it suitable for agriculture, the goal is to increase livelihood options for the local residents. There was increased communication between citizen scientists and small-holding farmers, creating an opportunity to work towards climate justice.

Open access citizen science and bees

In another example, MDPI’s journal, Sustainability, published a review on citizen science and the monitoring of bees in open access. Given their importance to the environment, many members of the public have taken up beekeeping as a hobby. This systematic review compared different citizen science studies about bees. It surprisingly found that these kinds of projects are already contributing to scientific research.

Climate Justice: Drones and Open Access

As Katherine notes in her article on Drones for Climate Justice, drones are boosting environmental action in new ways. This includes collecting data, as well as being used to take physical action to change our environment.

Katherine provides a deep-dive into drones highlighting valuable information about different kinds of drones, from single-rotor to underwater, and also gives us a sense of how these powerful tools can help us to provide better information about climate change to scientists and academia.

What are drones? What do drones cost? And how can they be used?

It’s impossible to dispute that drones are now part of our lives. Using these valuable tools to help us with the climate is a great idea.

For more on drones, check out this other article about how we can use drones to study wildfires.