Climate.edu: Ep4 Opening Access to Knowledge to Accelerate 
Climate Action with Dr. Monica Granados of the Open Climate Campaign

Episode Transcript

[Theme Music]

HOST: Welcome to Climate.edu, the podcast exploring climate action at the intersection of 
climate change and higher education. 

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, the process for publishing research can be glacially slow, to 
use an apt adverb, and when it finally is published, more often than not, it is locked behind the 
paywall of one a handful of big academic publishers. Nevermind that this research is usually 
taxpayer-funded through federal grants: it is handed over to powerful for-profit publishers, who 
then sell it back to taxpayers through hefty subscription fees. If you canÕt pay for a subscription, 
or get access through your college, university, or organization, you are SOL. And, in the case 
of climate change, so is the planet. Because tragically, the majority of climate change research 
is locked behind one of these paywalls, 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, Òthe knowledge about 
climate--research, data, educational resources, software-- them must be open.Ó 

The issue of open access and open education is close to my heart--I spent a good chunk of my 
career in education advocating for and supporting open education, open textbooks, and open 
educational practices.  So it was great to get into the open access weeds with Monica, and also 
take the opportunity to promote what I think is a crucial but little-known tool for combating 
climate change: open licensing.  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.   

Dr. Monica Granados has a PhD in ecology from McGill University. She has worked on open 
knowledge initiatives with Mozilla, PREreview and the Government of Canada. Without further 
ado, here is my conversation with Monica Granados. 
  

HOST: Welcome, Dr. Monica Granados to Climate.edu. Thanks for being here. 

DR. MONICA GRANADOS [MG]: Thanks so much, Richard, for having me. 

HOST: So you work at an organization called Creative Commons. I'm pretty familiar 
with Creative Commons from my past work, but some of our listeners may not be 
familiar with Creative Commons and what it does, or maybe they just need a refresher. 
So can you tell us Before we get into your work on the Open Climate Campaign, tell us 
a little bit about Creative Commons, what that organization is about, what it does.

MG: Yeah, absolutely. I love when I run into people where I say, I work at Creative 
Commons and they get really excited, and so I'd love for more people to know about 
Creative Commons so that I get that experience. So you might know Creative 
Commons from a couple of different places, depending on what part of the world you 
operate in. If you are someone who publishes, you probably see those open licenses on 
printed materials. So a lot of materials that get published by national governments and 
non-profits. will use a CC license, so a Creative Commons license. You might see these 
licenses if you're an artist and you're using, you know, some photographs or you're 
creating a collage, you might see, you know, the CC license on the piece of art or the 
piece of work. Really what these licenses do is they work on top of copyright, so 
copyright keeps the material as yours, the ownership is yours, but by working on top of 
copyright, it gives the copyright holders a way to share their work. and give people an 
explicit permission to use their work. So we have a wide spectrum of licenses that range 
from most permissible to least permissible. We have licenses where you are putting the 
work into the public domain. So that's our CC0 license, and on the other end of the 
spectrum, can put restrictions on how you want your work to be used. Most often you'll 
probably see a cc by license. So a cc by license again gives others explicit permission 
to use that work but requires you to attribute the work. So if I for example take a 
document that has a CC by license and I, you know, take parts of it, like take big chunks 
of it, you know, outside of like what would be considered fair use, and I use it for 
another product that I'm creating, I have to attribute where that original source is from. 
It's just a really great type of tool to make it easier to share content, to create a 
commons for people to be able to share knowledge and art and music, and I 
specifically, I'm interested in the part where we talk about sharing scientific knowledge 
using these licenses. 

HOST: Yeah. So, you know, my experience. is mostly in the education space, 
promoting what are called open educational resources. So, you know, college faculty 
may have definitely heard of what's called OER, which are, you know, you use these 
open licenses to, you know, reduce what are the exorbitant costs of textbooks for 
students and give faculty more flexibility. you mentioned, this is, you know, the licenses 
are, you know, used for much more than just kind of educational textbooks. You know, 
they involve museums, libraries, music collections, whatever. How does it, how does the 
licenses connect to climate change and the Open Climate Campaign? 

MG: Yeah. So I'm working on on this four-year project called the Open Climate 
Campaign where we're working to make the production of climate research open as the 
norm, and the reality is that's not really where we are. So let's take one specific output 
of knowledge around climate change research. the scientific publication. That's really 
the medium by which scientists communicate their findings. So if you're good, the first 
place that science gets delivered and like new science and like new research and new 
innovation, it's going to get published in a scientific publication. That's really also the 
currency, which is. is used to gauge scientists productivity and excellence. So the 
scientific publication is really important across many dimensions, not only as a 
communication tool, but many scientists engage in that practice, because that's the way 
you know that they are assessed, and to access that publication, if you're another 
scientist, you probably will be to read that work because you're part of an institution that 
will have a subscription. So like any magazine that you might read off the newsstand, 
you know, you will probably have to pay for that specific, that specific magazine, that 
specific edition of Vanity Fair, but if you subscribe to Vanity Fair, they're gonna, you 
know, they're gonna send it to you. So if you're a researcher at an institution, your 
library pays for that subscription. However, if you're anywhere outside of that institution, 
if you are a policymaker, if you're a decision maker, if you're a high school student, if 
you're a college student that doesn't have a subscription to that particular journal, you 
probably won't be able. to read that scientific paper, that output, that new knowledge 
without paying a fee, and, you know, you might say, well, when I go to read a magazine 
off the newsstand, I have to pay an amount to read that. However, when it comes to the 
publication of scientific journals, you effectively have already paid for that research 
being part of the tax base because a lot of the research that gets published has been 
supported by grants from your national government, and so for you to have to then pay 
to read that is, you know, is not equitable. It's not just and prevents. access to that 
knowledge. 

HOST: It's messed up. I mean, I think, you know, if you're not part of a kind of a higher 
ed space, you know, hearing about, you know, the ways that academic publishers kind 
of, I really think it kind of feed off of academia is, you know, like I said, it's a really unjust 
process that, you know, I think is due for changing. But anyway, sorry to interrupt. 

MG: Yeah, or some innovation, right. 

HOST: Right, but really. innovation right right but really Kind of using, again, using the 
funding of higher ed and grants and taxpayer dollars, and then kind of basically selling it 
back to people. I think if most people understood it, would see kind of the real significant 
unfairness. 

MG: Absolutely. 

HOST: But anyway, go on, I interrupt, sorry. 

MG: No, no, I think that's what you just brought up is like, you know, it seems so 
inherently unfair, like, why don't most people know about this? And, and that's because 
you, you know, not many people outside of like the scientific discipline will encounter 
this issue. But I'll give you a very specific example where, you know, people outside of, 
of academia encounter know if you have if you're diagnosed with a new illness and you 
want to go learn more information outside of what's on like WebMD and you want to you 
know you want to get to the primary literature you won't be able to read about you know 
the new disease that you've just been diagnosed with or that someone in your family 
has been diagnosed with and you know that's when people start to counter how unfair 
this system is, and so now extrapolate it to something even bigger, a problem that's 
affecting all of us. To get back to your question around climate change, we want to 
know more about, we know a lot about what's causing climate change, but there's still 
new information that is coming out of climate change, especially in the ways that it's 
starting to accelerate, like the impacts are accelerating. So this is a knowledge base 
that should be accessible to everyone, to other scientists, to decision-makers, and the 
reality is is that many of them are confronting this paywall. In fact, only about 50% of 
scientific... papers that follow the umbrella of climate change are open, meaning that 
there's no, you don't hit a paywall, and 50% are behind that paywall, and so the way 
that it intersects with with Creative Commons is that many of the articles that are open 
will carry a Creative Commons license. So not only are they free to read so that you're 
not hitting a paywall, but by having an open license, it also allows the remix and reuse 
of the content so that that knowledge can be spread faster and wider. But it's not the 
norm. 

HOST:- Well, yeah, it's only 50% or less. right? 

MG: Right

HOST:Éand so, just to clarify, so, you know, if something is, has a Creative Commons 
license on it, the license you described earlier, you don't have to go through that 
paywall. You can have direct access to that, you know, depending on the license, to 
kind of see and use and repurpose that. data, which I would think, I mean, another thing 
about generally academic publishing or publishing of research is like the timeline, going 
through the kind of the large publishers and this whole process and getting, you know, 
published in journals, is it faster to, is kind of faster? Or is, you know, does the open 
licensing help kind of speed up to the access to this knowledge compared to like 
traditional publishing? 

MG: Yeah, it can, and, you know, there is a little bit of a, there's a distinction between 
what we call free to read and then, and then like open, truly open access. So, you know, 
you'll find that certain papers. will be free to read, but they don't necessarily have to 
have an open license to them. So that's great. You're able to read the material, but then 
you don't have that explicit permission to reuse that knowledge or reuse the text and 
data mine, pull out pieces of the work and reuse it for your own work. You couldn't do a 
translation on it. example. But I'll give you an example where open licenses are used to 
make the process faster, the process of publishing. You alluded to how long it can take. 
I was a former practicing researcher. I knew how important it was to publish and I was 
often waiting 12 to 24 months between having my paper reviewed and revisions and 
decisions, you know, you are waiting at least a year and often over a year for that work 
to be able to be made public. So a way that these open licenses are interfacing with 
speeding up the public process is through preprints. Preprints are a version of the 
manuscript that hasn't gone through peer review yet. They have become increasingly 
popular. Actually, there was a there was an article that recently came out in, I think it 
was Nature, that showed how preprinting are becoming more and more popular 
amongst researchers, particularly after COVID-19. So we often point to what happened 
in scholarly communication during COVID-19 because it was this like seismic shift from 
these sort of like previous practices of very close, very slow processes to recognizing 
that we needed to act. access to this research and speeding up the process and 
opening up a lot of this information. Preprints are a way to do that. So what you do 
when you when you upload a preprint, often, you as soon as you have like a version of 
your scientific paper ready to go, you will upload it to a preprint, and often 
simultaneously, you'll also then sort of publishing pipeline to get it reviewed, et cetera. 
But what that means is that if you have a pre-print out, the work that's going behind the 
scenes on the publishing pipeline is happening behind closed doors, and in the 
meantime, you have a version of the work that is open and accessible. and will often 
have a CC license on it. We are actually in the middle of a project where we're 
recommending and encouraging preprint servers and researchers and the funders of 
research to put CC by licenses on the preprints. that knowledge can be remixed, 
reused, translated right away, and you don't have to wait until the publishing pipeline 
reaches its conclusion in 12 to 24 months. 

HOST: Oh, so you could... So those open... 

MG: Yes, go ahead. 

HOST: So those are two different things. You could submit it to a traditional publication 
and openly license it. the pre-print or is that only to open journals? 

MG: No, you can do both. You can do both, and so, and many journals now have pre-
print friendly policies, not all. There actually is a ASAP.io and Sherpa Romeo are two 
resources that you can look up the policy of the journal, but the majority of them have 
very pre-print friendly policies that allow you. to have an openly licensed work on a pre-
print server and still follow the traditional publishing pipeline at your journal of choice. 

HOST: - Right. Great, so thank you for making that connection and certainly, I guess 
Creative Commons does this work and has done it for a long time working with, you 
know, opening knowledge generally, you know, whether it's academic knowledge or 
research or data, music, you know. How did this work, you know, this work around the 
Open Climate Campaign is fairly new. You guys have been kind of up and running 
about a year and a half, as I understand it. How did this line of work, how did this work, 
how did this work, how did this work, how of work get started on focusing specifically on 
climate research and data? What was the motivation for Creative Commons to start 
focusing specifically on this topic? 

MG: Yeah, I mean, I think I'll take us back to that thought experiment that we had 
around having access to, you know, information. about something that you're being 
impacted by, you know, whether, you know, that's, you know, a disease or maybe it's 
something that's happening in your neighborhood and extrapolating that out to 
something that is affecting everyone on the planet, and that's climate change. We, you 
know, we thought, we need to elevate this conversation around access to knowledge. 
What is something that is affecting everyone on the planet, although not evenly, not in 
the same way. There are those that are disproportionately impacted more. others, but 
everyone is feeling an impact of climate change and it's going to get increasingly, the 
impact is going to get increasingly larger. So climate change really is that global 
problem and it came really to on the heels of that phenomenon that we saw with 
COVID-19. 19. We in the open access, and open knowledge community, we often have 
talked about the need. You know, this discourse that we need to have around the fact 
that a lot of the knowledge that we produce is not physically accessible to the masses, 
and it's particularly egregious when most of it is publicly funded. it, and the fact that we 
need this knowledge to solve problems, and we really saw that come to fruition with 
COVID-19. It was a problem that was so present in everyone's lives that, you know, this 
argument that we had been making for 20 years, sort of finally actually came the global 
discourse, and there was a recognition finally that this argument is true, we need access 
to knowledge, we need access to knowledge quickly, and it's particularly important 
when it is a global problem like COVID-19, and there was this recognition, there was, I 
think at the number of articles that are on COVID-19, you know, greater than 80% of 
those are open. Like 100,000 preprints were uploaded around COVID-19 when there 
was zero, you know, before 2020. The vaccine was, the vaccine came. came from the 
sequencing of the COVID virus that was made openly available, and this sort of 
practices that we were hoping, we want them to be these norms, were implemented 
because there was this urgency and this global scale problem, and so on the heels of 
that, and recognizing like that climate change is an equally important and impactful and 
at the same scale, we wanted to see if we could ignite that same reaction and 
recognition that climate change knowledge needs to be open so that we can develop 
mitigations and solutions like we did for COVID-19, the development of vaccines and 
the development of therapeutics did arise because we started literally from almost zero 
knowledge about this novel coronavirus, to fully sequencing it, having a vaccine, you 
know, who's of course, whose efficacy depended on other external factors, but 
therapeutics that have been also very, very promising. 

HOST: So it sounds though, it sounds like during this window where where the world 
was open to this approach for good reason, right, we're dealing with this novel virus, 
and, you know, was global in nature, but it sounds like, you know, that COVID kind of 
subsided for the most part, that the window didn't stay open, that kind of, as you're 
saying, the climate research, you were 80% with COVID and you're kind of back to 
around, hovering around 50 for climate research is, you know. Is that how you would 
characterize that brief moment of unity, and then a kind of a return to kind of the 
copyrighted and the traditional way of approaching research? 

MG: Yeah, that's a really good way of putting it. In fact, actually, so one of the things 
that we've learned from sort of this like COVID experiment in scholarly communication 
was that many of the publishers did open up the publications around COVID-19. But 
they were temporarily opened. So like they didn't have, you know, open, like CC 
licenses or open licenses, and so after you know, like you said, this window closed, 
many of them actually were put back behind a paywall, and the COVID publications, 
yeah, so they were only temporarily opened. You know, this is sort of the, this is the 
challenge that the open access movement has been facing for many. years and that is 
that there is a very strong external force that is propped up by this assessment system 
that I talked about earlier for scientists that these publications are so powerful and so 
important and they're controlled by the publishers that it's really hard to change culture 
because the incentives for researchers are to publish, and to publish in journals that are 
highly cited, and then the publishers have just a lot of control because they're the ones 
who do the processing of putting these publications. and their version of record and this 
currency, they control the currency, even though they don't produce any of the labor or 
knowledge that goes into this currency, and so, I think that that is a challenge, and also, 
I like the metaphor of the window closing. I think if we were still in the midst of COVID 
because if it hadn't subsided or we hadn't found vaccines and therapeutics, the problem 
would still be at everyone's door and we would still have this, we would still be in that 
culture shift of open sharing and rapid publication, and we don't see that in climate 
change either, right? We know it's a really big problem. We, you know, we get, you 
know, we have much hotter summers, I live in Ottawa, the canal that that people have 
skated on for hundreds of years, it's the second year in a row that people haven't really 
been able to skate on the on the canal. Like these are sort of, you know, these are the 
small impacts, especially in the global North that we're feeling, and it's just not knocking 
on people's doors the way that COVID-19 did, and so I think, you know, existentially 
people know it's a problem that climate change is an issue, but it's not, they don't feel it 
the way they did for COVID-19 or like they couldn't go to work or sadly, some people, 
you know, lost loved ones. it was very real, and I think part of the work that we want to 
do is to show let's change the culture of sharing around climate change research before 
we feel it. Before it's the kind of problem that, you know, where we react after the fact 
instead of before. We're trying to get ahead head of it. 

HOST:  Yeah, I think certainly the COVID was a different beast in a sense that, like you 
said, these impacts were right there. People were catching the virus, and with climate 
change, it's emerging. Certainly, we can see it happening, but I think it's often hard to 
get your arms around if you're just a regular Joe or if you're, you know, it's hard to see 
oftentimes the urgency behind it because we are oftentimes responding to future, you 
know, a future that we can't really see, and so I was going to ask you how the, how this 
is going, you know, with your, you know, half, what kind of progress have you made with 
the Open Climate Campaign? What are you seeing? What's the response been from 
these academic institutions, as well as other research and science institutions, where 
oftentimes the incentives may be a little different, maybe not there to kind of share. your 
work? Are you are you making headway with this project? 

MG: Yeah, I think we are, and we're discovering a lot, too, and then adapting our 
communications and the support that we're providing through the campaign as we, you 
know, as we discover barriers. What we've discovered depends on like our, you know, 
the target group that we've been talking to. So we, so when we talk to researchers, for 
example, you know, the researchers have a lot of power, they have a lot of power to 
publish preprints, they have a lot of power to retain their rights and put open open 
licenses CC licenses on on their work. But I, you know, the resistance that I encounter 
when I talk to researchers with the narrative that, you know, you're working on the 
world's greatest problem, your work and your outputs need to be open so that we can 
leverage that into mitigations and solutions, is a powerful and it resonates, and they 
want their work to be open, and then the resistance that I encounter is, "But it's going to 
cost too much money." And many researchers are unaware that there are multiple 
pathways to make your work open that does not require you paying an article 
processing fee to make it. your work openly accessible. 

HOST: The cost is that they think they're going to have to pay as researchers. 

MG: That's right. 

HOST: Okay. 

That's right, and I hear that time and time again. I'll give a talk at a conference 
specifically, you know, doing outreach to researchers and they say, "This is great. I 
believe in it, but show me the money." And that's when I say, "Actually, you know what? 
There are... multiple pathways. You can you can pre-print you know your your work and 
with pre-prints you also then can get feedback early on in the process. You get to plant 
your flag on this is a you know the specific topic that you're working on. You can put the 
pre-printing on your CV while it's going through the traditional publishing pipeline. 
There's some you know there's which is many advantages of pre-printing. You also can 
deposit a version of your manuscript into your institutional repository, making it open, 
and so there's these pathways they actually don't really know very much about. There's 
no one who's been doing that advocacy also 'cause there's no incentive to do that 
advocacy, certainly not if you're a publisher. there's perhaps there's no mandate for 
someone to be doing that advocacy to researchers, and so so discovering that has 
really, you know, shifted a little bit of our strategy to go and get this message out 
recognizing that like, who, who can we connect with that libraries, for example, that can 
talk to researchers and say, article processing charges aren't your is, is one of the 
options available to you. But there are two to three other options that are no cost to you. 
So, you know, that has been really revelatory, and you know, slowly making progress 
because the, you know, the base of researchers is really big and really diverse, and 
figuring out ways of like, how do we, how can we reach researchers and tell them about 
different options? 

HOST: Is that an institution by institution kind of contact? Are you kind of going and 
knocking on doors and meeting with librarians and other folks involved in the research 
institutions? Do you usually use other mechanisms? What's the way that you're 
connecting with these faculty that might be open to openly licensing their research? 

MG: Yeah, so far it has been at the institution level. But we, you know, starting to 
explore, you know, what if we reach out to the, like, societies? So so for example, the 
ecologists have a society, limnologists have have societies, and doing doing the 
advocacy, like through those channels, especially because they're well respected. it, 
and, you know, are, are the, the organization that, in a way, represents this group of 
researchers in that particular subdiscipline. But that's hard, that's hard to do, because it 
is so, you know, disciplines are pretty disparate, they're spread out. So, you know, in 
addition to that type of advocacy, we also know that having open access policies can be 
a powerful way to change behavior and a way to also communicate these different 
avenues to open access of publications. So we are, a lot of the work that we're doing is 
creating these open access policies. So we've been working with national governments, 
funders, and we're looking to work with environmental organizations as well to create 
open access policies. So what does that mean? So national governments are the major 
funders of this research. As I mentioned, you know, you contribute, you're part of the tax 
base, you money through your taxes and part of that money amongst many other 
different expenditures gets set aside for research, and then a part of that parcel is for 
grants to researchers at different institutions in your country, and what we're working on 
is creating creating policies that require the grantees, so those that get those grants, 
that in order to get that grant, you have to follow the policy which requires you to publish 
a version of that scientific paper openly, and so whether that's through a preprint, 
whether that's a deposition. of your, you know, of a version of your manuscript in an 
institutional repository, or whether it is through publishing in an open access journal that 
may or may not have an article processing charge, and so we're working, you know, 
with the holders of these, of the money, control the money and putting rules around 
money that will initiate a culture change around open sharing, and in those 
communications, you know, we will, it's not just about make your work open by any 
means necessary. It's, these are the recommendations. that we have so that it's an 
equitable policy that doesn't lean on just paying for making your work open, but 
supports all of these other routes to open access that are less costly and often more 
equitable. Ð 

HOST: That's great. I mean, I've found in my past work with you know, open 
educational resources that, you know, both of these are tools that were really effective, 
just the engaging with faculty, especially faculty talking to other faculty about opening a 
textbook in this example, right, or developing a textbook that's openly licensed, as well 
as, you know, attaching these conditions to grant. money, which is optional. You can 
take it or not. Because it is generally publicly funded oftentimes in education, that you're 
just saying, "Hey, we paid for it, so we want to see it when you're done with it. So here's 
some open licensing policy." Have the national that you've been talking to and the other 
large environmental organizations and funders, what's the response been? Have you 
felt a pretty positive response? Is it mixed bag? Is it a learning process? 

MG: Yeah, I mean, I think most of the end of, the organizations that we've spoken to, 
whether it's a national government, a funder, or an environmental organization. really 
believes in those, you know, in the premise that if the, if this research is publicly funded, 
you know, you have to, it should be openly available to the masses that have paid for 
this research. you know, it's sort of a, it's a moral imperative. They believe in that. But 
they, you know, they face the same barriers that researchers face and the open access 
movement face, which is that, you know, it's really, there's so much inertia in the And it's 
really hard to change a system that has been churning away, you know, for a hundred 
years or a little bit less since, you know, at least when we move to digital publications. 
But, you know, this system of the publishers having a lot of control means that they face 
a lot of resistance to change the system. them, and so in the same you know, in these 
like listening and engagement sessions that we have with national governments, you 
know, the publishers will also participate in these conversations and argue why the 
present system is working well or should stay in place, and so, You know, it's hard to 
move the needle when it's been, when it's, this has been the system for a really long 
time and there's someone advocating for the persistence of the status quo. So I'm really 
optimistic. 

HOST: Things have, I mean, open access journals have grown and seems like more 
and more faculty or researchers are agreeing to or see some kind of benefit to 
publishing and open access. What did it take for them to do that? Are the incentives 
different for some institutions? Is it some faculty are just, you know, that's just what they, 
that's the, again. that moral imperative, right? It is working to some extent, and why is 
that? Why are some researchers choosing open access journals? Is it generally they do 
a mix of things? Or are the incentives change for them? 

MG: Yeah, I would say it's probably less incentive. of the incentives and I think the 
publishing options have changed, and so many of the of the journals that were not open 
access now have a have a route to open access but through an article processing 
charge so where the where the researcher is paying to make that work open. So for a 
well-funded institution, it's not an issue. For many institutions, actually, they have a pot 
of money that they allocate for researchers to make their work open. But if you're from a 
smaller institution, even within, say, the United States or within Canada, for example, 
publishing a article as a scientist, especially in the natural scientist, publishing a paper 
in nature is the, you know, is the pinnacle of success. When I was a researcher, that's 
what I wanted to do. I knew that that was a key to be able to continue successfully in the 
academic route, and now, if you're required... to make it open or you want to make it 
open, the article processing charge for Nature, I think the last time I checked was 
$8,000. So yeah, $8,000 is, you know, that's a student salary in even in the United 
States or Canada. It's the salary of a researcher in somewhere in an institution in South 
America. in Brazil, I've spoken to researchers there who have said we could never pay 
that, and so even though there's more options, like part of the work that we're doing at 
the Open Climate Campaign is to make sure that non-APC routes are equally viable 
and equally rewarded and known. embedded in these policies. Otherwise, we're just 
returning back to the same system where the publishers have the power, they're making 
work open, but they're charging exorbitant fees to make that work open. We really want 
the power to be in the knowledge production, the knowledge producers' hands. 

HOST: Right.

MG: To have a viable option to make it open that is not a non-APC route. 

HOST:  So you go directly to faculty, which as you said is challenging. You work on 
these larger government funders or institutional. you know, policies around open. Do 
you talk directly with the publishers? Are you working with the, with these mega 
publishers and academic publishers as well? 

MG: Yeah, and I have to say, yeah, we have, we have spoken to them, and, you know, 
it's really interesting to get to work with, you know, sort of like this, you know, like, you 
know, when you're a researcher, you know, like the people behind the curtain, who 
could who have, you know, a lot of power and control, not only in your fate, but in like 
the fate of knowledge production, and I've, you know, had really friendly conversations 
with with many of them. We are embarking on It's something we called an unbinding 
project. It's based on a proposal from Peter Suber, who has been in the open access 
movement for some time and used to be at the Harvard Library, and the idea is that you 
would, through various means, get a corpus of papers, so like a group of papers that 
you have deemed to be the most, you know, extremely important, and that this like this 
corpus of papers needs to be open, it's foundational research, it has, you know, some of 
the discoveries around, around climate change, for example, and many of like, you 
know, the initial papers on climate change are still behind a paywall. I often give an 
example around, you know, how we mobilized around chlorofluorocarbons and the 
effect on the ozone as an exemplar for how humanity can mobilize to address the global 
problem. paper that discovered the effects of chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs, on the ozone 
or on O3 is still behind a paywall. So thinking about those types of papers and putting 
them in, you know, gathering them up and then assessing which publisher has 
published each one of these, let's say, 500 papers, and going to the publisher and 
saying, you have published one of the most, you know, seminal papers in climate 
change, it's still behind a paywall, this knowledge needs to be opened, can we negotiate 
to have this work opened? And so we're in the middle of working to create that corpus 
and figuring out sort of what's the best methodological approach to creating the corpus 
of, you know, 500 papers, and in the middle... 

HOST: - What is that negotiation with them? Is that paying some kind of... 

MG: It may, it may. I mean, we're hoping that like, because, you know, open access is... 
such a bigger part of the discussion that we hope that they will open it because it's 
going to be such a small percentage of the total number of papers that they publish. 
You know, it'll be, you know, the 10 papers that belong to them will be, you know, 
0.0001% of their, the total papers that they have. in their entire corpus, and, you know, 
we're hoping to that, you know, that they're going to earn goodwill from this work, you 
know, we'll work with them to publicize this, the partnership and their involvement in 
opening up these fundamental publications. and that it won't require us paying a fee to 
open them. It could, you know, if we have a couple of papers where like it's not 
negotiable, it's something that we would be willing to discuss. But the idea is that, you 
know, we're making the argument that many of these publications have been open for 
many years, like the paper on chlorofluorocarbons is. a paper from the 1970s, you 
know, so like, you have made a lot of money already from from that publication. You 
know, you can read it, 

HOST: I think it's time to free it. 

MG: Yeah, it's time to free this publication, or, you know, these 10 publications, and 
yeah, the the conversations we've had so far, you know, we've been building 
relationships with these publishers. I mean, the majority of them do believe in this in the 
access to knowledge, they also know they're just part of the system that makes the 
knowledge accessible in a way, and, you know, it was encouraging to know that, you 
know, many of them, the ones that we spoke to so far have been interested in this 
project and open to collaboration. 

HOST: Yeah.  So I have a few more questions for you. So are we, so I know 
governmental organizations as organizations like NOAA or NASA, I believe already 
have open policies. You know, so they do a lot of the kind of big research projects, 
especially around climate. A lot of foundations and funders, maybe not a lot, but I know 
some are, you know, adopting open policy as well. Are you... So when we're talking 
about climate research, your work with like kind of open... open climate campaign and 
climate research. How big a slice of that research is within kind of what we call 
academia, within higher education, and how much is, would you say is somehow 
outside or external to that through the government or external organizations? Are you 
mainly working with higher ed or is that a small chunk. 

MG: That's a really good question, like how the distribution of sort of the knowledge 
production around climate change. 

HOST: Yeah, and the focus of the work that you're doing, right?

MG: So you know, I know there's probably a lot of very kind of smaller projects and you 
know, just like all research, right? It happens at higher ed, but, but in. kind of a way of 
kind of the impact that you want to have? How much is it through higher ed and how 
much is it through something that's outside of a higher ed? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of 
it is happening at higher ed, and, you know, through the strategy of implementing 
national policies in some. cases, and like in certain, in certain countries, it will hit both. 
So by for example, you know, the US federal government has now has policies around 
access because of what we call the Nelson Memo that requires now that all government 
agencies have open access policies. So that is at the national level, at the US 
government level. But it covers the NIH and the NSF who give out-- grants to academic 
institutions, and so those are the most impactful kind of policies because you get to 
affect not only the research that happens within the government, but also the grants that 
go outside to academic institutions. I do think that the academic institutions will take 
longer. It's much easier to do to put in like a government-wide policy that then affects 
like the internal research or what, you know, we call intramural research. It's harder to 
put in policies that will affect academic institutions because they are all independent, 
and they each will have their own policy, and so I mean, I do think that's something that 
we need to address, and there is there's a project called Helios, where institutions are 
coming together to talk about like, how do we operationalize, like, getting open access 
policies at all, like institutions of higher learning in the United States, and doing it in like 
a systematic way and having that are having policies also that align so that you don't 
have different policies, especially because there's so much collaboration amongst 
researchers across institutions. So I think the lower hanging is the intramural research, 
so the government research. It's great when we can have a policy that also affects the 
grants that go out to academic institutions or institutions of higher learning. But I do 
think that they produce a lot of knowledge and that it's just harder to implement policies 
because of the distrust. the structure of institutions and, you know, they're autonomous 
and that's great for many reasons, it just makes it harder to do advocacy to them. 

HOST: Yeah, I think that's a, it's an interesting, I don't know if it's a conundrum is the 
right we have this really, speaking of the United States, this enormous footprint of higher 
ed across the country through research institutions, Research One, the big research 
institutions, four years, community colleges, but very, very few mechanisms for 
coordinating the work of these institutions. its uses on something as challenging and 
existential as climate change. So in my work with Open and in my conversations with 
organizations that may not be aware of Open licensing or Open data or Open research, 
it seems like a really great opportunity to to encourage more of that, not just openly 
licensing your work, right, but using kind of openness in that way to have more kind of 
collaborative projects between institutions or researchers, right, to kind of make it more 
visible and also accelerate. what we have to do, right? So using OVEN to kind of 
accelerate knowledge creation around climate change or mitigation or adaptation and 
things like that. Is that at all a part of this work or of interest of the institutions that you 
work with? 

MG: I mean, yeah, certainly, you know, that, that, you know, that's the argument, you 
know, around it's around not only just making work open, but openly licensed, and that, 
you know, that's sort of like that second layer of advocacy that we do is talking about the 
need to make things accessible, but also, you know, they it's, it's more than just making 
them free to free to read is like, how do we enable the the possibilities of open with 
open licensing? We've been talking a lot about this specifically around like artificial 
intelligence and like what that technology can do, particularly with open content and 
openly licensed content. So so you this, that is a part of that of that narrative, and it also 
goes beyond just climate change, you know, like, you know, this is a really, we chose 
climate change, because it's a really concrete example of why knowledge has to be 
made open. But, you know, we should be doing this for, for the multitude of challenges 
that in this world, a multitude of diseases and other challenges. Like, why don't we have 
a campaign for Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, or that's affecting thousands of people. But I 
think the argument that we're making is that, when we bring this conversation to 
somebody who is funding research, the policy doesn't say only open climate change 
research, it will be, you know, we're using climate change as a lever to get in a policy 
that's going to open all research. 

HOST: Yeah, good point. 

MG: It's going to require open for all of the outputs, regardless as if it's around climate 
change or not, because that really should be how we're working, you know, there 
shouldn't be a paywall to knowledge that has been produced, like morally, but certainly 
also ethically in terms of knowledge that's already been paid for by the same people 
you're asking to pay again. Yeah. Like it's just it's such an injustice. It's you know, it 
keeps me up at night 

HOST: So, so what are so I have two more questions for you the first is What are your 
plans for the coming year? Well, you know what you did mention before how you kind of 
shift a little little bit based on kind of what you're finding out, so you are discovering as 
you go along and as this project develops, but what's coming up for you as a focus 
area, is it's, you know, staying kind of where you are and just kind of continuing to build 
awareness, and do you have, you know, any other directions that you want to take this 
project? 

MG: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say like two things are on my radar for 2024. The first 
is we're going to start, we're looking to work with environmental organizations to do 
some of the, this policy development work, but also to talk to them about opening up 
some of their, their resources, including their educational resources. A lot of 
environmental organizations contract out work to develop educational materials that 
then they use and a lot of them are all rights reserved. So we're looking to partner with 
these environmental organizations. We'd come in absolutely free of charge and provide, 
you know, thousands of dollars worth of construction. consulting to help them open up 
these educational resources around climate change, around biodiversity, so that they 
have a greater impact ultimately, because they can be spread out further, translated, 
remixed and reused. So we're really looking forward to developing those partnerships. is 
really sort of around, I think, just elevating the footprint or the presence of the Open 
Climate Campaign, particularly in the dialogue around climate change. So one of my 
major goals for this year is to attend the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties, so 
COP29, and bring together other organizations and individuals working at the 
intersection of open and climate to elevate this, the discourse around how does open, 
what role does open play in tackling the climate crisis? Because I think it really hasn't 
been part of the conversation. There's a lot of elements, of course, and unfortunately so, 
of climate change. It's very multidimensional. It's a complex problem. But I haven't heard 
a lot about the role that open plays, and I want to elevate that discourse into the 
coverage that the COP has. that COP gets the conversations around open. So we've 
recently brought in a communications person to the team, and we've been connecting 
with other organizations, as I mentioned, and at the intersection of open and climate, so 
that we can have this sort of consortium of people that are bringing this conversation. 
conversation to the to the fold, um, because I think ultimately, you know, that needs to 
be part of the climate change conversation, but I do, you know, have always had this 
this vision or goal to elevate the conversation to to the around open access to the 
public, you know, as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that most people 
really don't know about this injustice until they're faced with it, and luckily, most people 
won't be faced with it unless they're in the academic institution, or they, you know, 
something bad happens. But I think if more people knew about this injustice, that there 
would be pressure to change the way that we do scholarly communication, that's the 
same pressure. that was put on publishers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's, you 
know, that we had, there was a letter that was signed by over a dozen science advisors 
and chief science advisor asking publishers to make the work open, and they felt that 
pressure because the world was putting that pressure on, and I, you know, that's, I think 
that's. It's a goal. Yeah. Yeah, and I think if we can have this be a bigger part of the 
public discourse, we can put more pressure on the system and move that inertia 
towards openly sharing our work. 

HOST: I'm really interested to hear how that goes. I feel I've been working. know, just 
through my interest in climate change and moving into that area for professionally, 
conversations around openly licensing work, so particularly, you know, it was my 
interest in educational materials or curriculum or programs and things like that, and it's 
not just the kind of injustice. but almost like a relief for a lot of folks in these 
organizations, like they didn't know about it and it solves a big problem oftentimes. You 
know, they have to figure out what's copyright and what they can do, but a lot of times 
it's like, oh, wow, we can, wow, this allows us to expand or accelerate or whatever their 
goals are, and they just weren't. aware of it, so I think there's a lot of potential there, 
especially if you go to somewhere like COP where, that's where everybody is, right? Ð 

MG: Right. 

HOST: And hopefully you'll have some significant interest. 

-Yeah, that's the goal. I was there last COP, you know, to get sort of a sense a sense of 
the scale of the conference and the kinds of conversations that were happening, and 
there were some conversations about Open, but they were pretty small, and so I kind of 
want to bring this contingent to get that conversation going. 

HOST: My final question today is, so if I'm a... faculty member at an institution I'm doing 
some kind of research or collecting data related to to climate change and I'm hearing 
about the open climate campaign what what can I do as a faculty member is there do 
we go to your website is there are there tools or resources they can access in order to 
learn more and possibly look into open and licensing the research that they're 
conducting? 

MG: Yeah, great question. We, you know, we sort of did that type of thought experiment 
and said, like, let's, how do we equip researchers who want to, who believe in that, you 
know, that their work should be open but don't know how, and, and a lot of the times it's 
mentioned, you know, think that the only route to do that is to pay an article processing 
charge. So if you go to our website, openclimatecampaign.org, and you go to our Get 
Involved page, we have a different section for researchers, for national governments, 
funders, environmental organizations. We're about to put one up for librarians. But in 
this scenario, you're a researcher, if you click the researcher page, you'll be able to 
download our action kit and our action kit, you know, states, here are the things that you 
can do to advance the goals of the open climate campaign, and has links to resources 
on how you can pre print how you can make your data open, how you can deposit a 
manuscript, but that's the that's the route that you want to go. So all of the resources we 
have are around no cost, no APC routes to open. 

HOST: Great, so we'll put the link to the website in the show notes so we can access it. 
It sounds like you've got quite a few resources to help folks move forward if they wanna 
do that. Monica, it has been great. I've learned a lot. I really admire the work that you're 
doing, and thanks for being on climate.edu today. 

MG: My pleasure. Thanks for the great questions. 

HOST: Take care.

(upbeat music) 

Climate.edu is written by me, Richard Sebastian. The theme music is by Serge 
Quadrado. You'll find a link to Serge's free music archive page in the show notes, where 
you can also find a guest bio, transcripts, and additional links and resources. You can 
also go to the show website at climate.edu.com. Yes, that's right. climate.edu.com, 
where you'll find other episodes of climate.edu, get news and updates related to climate 
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Climate.edu | Episode 4 Transcript

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