This year’s theme for Open Access Week is “Open for Climate Justice.” Yale Climate Connections assigns three key factors to climate justice:

1. Climate justice begins with recognizing key groups are differently affected by climate change. While climate change is happening to everyone on the planet, some communities are more impacted than others. In addition, those most impacted by climate change generally have a small carbon output, specifically children and people in developing countries. 
2. Climate impacts can exacerbate inequitable social conditions. More people are becoming “climate refugees,” including the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe of Louisiana who were forced to leave their home on Isles de Jean Charles due to rising sea levels and people who have left their homes in California and other Western states due to the increasing number of forest fires. Uprooting your life is an expensive and stressful situation that few people willingly undertake, but with additional factors like natural disasters exacerbated by climate change, many people do not have a choice. Climate refugees have to find new housing, jobs, and support structures. They may have difficulty selling their flood-prone homes or may rely on buyout programs that only pay a fraction of what the owners need to find a new home. For those who are able to stay in their climate change impacted homes, they may no longer have access to the stores, people, and resources that left with the climate refugees, or have to pay higher insurance premiums.
3. Momentum is building for climate justice solutions. People of all walks of life are banding together to fight climate change. From climate pledges made by countries to grassroot groups and protests, people are highlighting the need for everyone to get involved to curb the effects of climate change. 

So what does Open Access have to do with climate justice? Everything. Everyone is impacted by climate change, so everyone should be able to freely access and contribute to the best scientific research. Iowa Research Online has gathered a collection of theses, articles, books, conference proceedings, and more that focus on climate change. You can find that collection here. Through reading, sharing, and discussing issues, we can make navigate climate change together.

There are many reasons you may want to find Open Access materials – easy collaboration and access, you just like the spirit of Open Access publishing, or more. Here are a few ways you can find what you’re looking for: 

When searching InfoHawk+ you can filter results specifically for Open Access materials (a lot of library catalogs have this feature!).

You may also find Open Access materials scattered throughout your results, marked with the orange Open Access symbol

Check out the Engineering Library Division of the American Society for Engineering Education’s Open Textbooks for Engineering. These resources are broken down by discipline. The Directory of Open Access Journals can also be a helpful resource to find accessible journals. 

Institutional repositories are another great place to look for resources. Iowa Research Online is a collection of over 100,000 research papers, theses, dissertations, books, conference presentations, and more, written by University of Iowa. If you’ve submitted a thesis as part of your work here at the University of Iowa, you may find your own work on there! 

Open Science takes the principles of Open Access and applies them to the scientific process. Researchers working in the Open Science framework actively share their data, tools, results, and more. Going further, Open Science seeks to include and learn from groups that have traditionally been excluded from the publishing process. 

The six principles of open science are:

• Open Methodology – Publicly sharing processes, procedures, and materials in detail so that others can analyze and reproduce your experiments faithfully.
• Open Source – Developing and sharing open source software, making tools for recording and analyzing data more accessible. 
• Open Data – Sharing your results allowing for reanalysis and comparison by others.
• Open Access – Publishing your findings in ways that are accessible to the most people (i.e. not behind a paywall).
• Open Peer Review – A review process with a wider community of reviewers, review reports published alongside the article, and known identities of those reviewers.
• Open Educational Resources – Freely accessible teaching, learning, and research materials. 

Keeping data, tools, and results open means that others can freely reanalyze and recreate studies, which will either reinforce or question the results, meaning the science gets better. 

This week we’ll be highlighting Open Access on the blog in celebration of Open Access Week!  Let’s start with the basics, what is Open Access? From our Scholarly Publishing LibGuide, “Open Access (OA) is the free, immediate, online availability of learning materials, research, and creative work.” Open Access helps to remove barriers to people who are traditionally kept out of academic circles, making research more accessible and equal. The traditional publishing model places a lot of valuable research behind a paywall. As a student, you can go right through many of these paywalls because of the access granted to you by the University of Iowa, but for the majority of people, these resources are out of reach. Open Access takes down those paywalls, and with more people having more access to more information, more research and collaboration happen, which means science, math, art, and every other discipline improves. The University of Iowa Libraries supports Open Access through negotiating transformative agreements and publishing discounts, and other open access agreements. Your professors may also publish their own works in Open Access! Follow along this week as we explore Open Access, Open Science, and how it impacts you.