[open-science] Climate Change

[John Wilbanks]

We've spent a lot of time on climate change and open science at Creative Commons. I have a personal interest, as my father is a climate change researcher and was an author on the most recent IPCC report. He and I co-wrote a paper on open innovation in sustainable development earlier this year which was OA, and the references for that paper are a good start for the non-data side of the problem. It's at http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/4/993/

In most cases in climate change science, impacts, and adaptive responses, the hurdles for open science are not intellectual property rights but scientific practices related to confidentiality and protecting one's own data and models - a different challenge. The current evaluation of iPCC being done by the Interacademy Council at the request of the UN is beginning to take a look at how such conventional scientific practices can become a threat to the perceived integrity of science. IP is a footnote in the debate, unlike in OA or in free software or in free culture. Our successes in these spaces have sadly conditioned us to look at "free" legal tools as our hammers, and see the world as a bunch of nails. It's a great irony actually. 

In the case of climate change mitigation, of course, the open science issues are similar to those in other areas of traditional manufactured technology - accentuated by the fact that the main drivers of increases in global GHG emissions are now in the larger developing countries, while the industrialized countries still control a lot of the intellectual property for addressing that problem....

In many ways the "open" debate about data fails to capture the reality of these issues. Making data open, even fully compliant with the Science Commons protocol, is actually far from enough. I hope that we can make these debates nuanced enough that we don't push "open" as the end game, because I can comply with the protocol, or with Panton, and still have my data be worthless from a scientific perspective. An extreme example would be that I publish PDFs of my data under PDDL, and claim the mantle of "open". If we as a community push "open" as the goal, and not "useful" as the goal, then we enable that outcome. 

Open climate science, at least as it regards data, is almost never an intellectual property problem. It's a culture problem, it's a technology problem (formats, ontologies, standards), and it's a language problem. It's a political problem, it's an incentive problem. Getting rid of the IP is no more than table stakes. And if we don't deal with the inventions - the technologies that both create climate problems and that promise to mitigate them in adaptation - then we won't be changing the world the way we want. That's a big part of why our science work has shifted to focusing significantly on patent licensing and materials transfer...

jtw


On Jun 15, 2010, at 5:42 AM, Lance McKee wrote:

> Peter,
> 
> I call your attention to one activity of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC): the GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot 3 (AIP-3) data sharing activity: http://sites.google.com/a/aip3.ogcnetwork.net/home/home/aip-3-kickoff/data-sharing-guidelines .
> 
> There are many in the OGC (http://www.opengeospatial.org) who share your concerns about climate data. OGC runs a consensus process in which government and private sector organizations collaborate to develop open interfaces and encodings that enable, among other things, sharing of geospatial data, including climate data. I think the OGC is likely to play an important role in the opening up of climate science.
> 
> I invite you to look through a presentation in which I gathered my learnings and musings about the importance, feasibility and inevitability of persistent and open publishing of scientific geospatial data: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=37254 .
> 
> Lance McKee
> Senior Staff Writer
> Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
> 508-752-0108
> lmckee at opengeospatial.org
> 
> The OGC: International Location Standards
> http://www.opengeospatial.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jun 15, 2010, at 3:33 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> 
>> I have posted a report on a meeting I went to last night.
>> http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=2449
>> I believe that this is an area in which the OKF's involvement will be positive and important.
>> 
>> -- 
>> Peter Murray-Rust
>> Reader in Molecular Informatics
>> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
>> University of Cambridge
>> CB2 1EW, UK
>> +44-1223-763069
>> _______________________________________________
>> open-science mailing list
>> open-science at lists.okfn.org
>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-science
> 
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