By Monica Granados, Julie Lowndes, Stefanie Butland | December 20, 2022
Reimagining open science as part of the climate movement
Our 7th Openscapes Community Call featured a “celebrity interview” with Monica Granados, PhD. Monica is the Open Climate Campaign Manager at Creative Commons and on the Leadership team of PREreview. She is an open science specialist and a trained ecologist. Monica was interviewed by Julie Lowndes, PhD, Openscapes Director. Watch the recording on Openscapes YouTube.
In this conversation, we dug into what each of us can do to connect our daily work to the climate movement. How do we connect “big problems” like climate change with “little problems” like sharing knowledge, data, different versions of files, and automating analyses & reports? We wanted to come away with concrete actions we can all weave into our daily work:
- If climate is part of your day job, how to leverage open science
- If open science is part of your day job, how to connect that to climate
Monica told us about her “origin story” in open science as an ecologist and the roles some people and organizations played. She shared how an open science course through NCEAS was pivotal, and how she came home a different person telling all her friends and colleagues “Have you heard about open science?!!!”. She was transformed by the idea that this was a different way to do science - a paradigmatic shift and a new philosophy of science. One moment in particular that stood out was when Karthik Ram, founder of rOpenSci, showed Monica how she could access Daniel Pauley’s fisheries work directly from R. Mozilla Open Leaders was another part of her journey, where she deepened her mindsets and skills for “working open”.
Monica also shared about the Open Climate Campaign - a 4-year project funded by the Arcadia Foundation to help make open sharing of resources around research the norm in climate science.
A recurring theme throughout the conversation was breaking down problems into tasks you can contribute to. It’s not about trying to solve the huge problem - it’s about bringing in your own expertise / perspective. “We need all the big things - policy, green solutions - but go where your own expertise is.”
After the interview, participants contributed to a rich conversation with questions touching on which workflows should be streamlined to reduce the time required to discover, connect, and coordinate around open science; funding models; licensing; and differences in how open science for climate is moving forward in governments, universities, and elsewhere. Collaborative notes are in our Google Doc.
We underestimate the power of contribution–of acting within our own sphere of influence to tackle the piece of the problem that is right in front of us. - Abigail Dillen in Litigating in a Time of Crisis, in All We Can Save
Resources
- Open Climate Campaign | Resources
- Julie Lowndes’ call to action to reimagine open science as part of the climate movement in her rstudio::conf(2022) keynote with Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel (video)
- The All We Can Save Project, book and community building around solutions
- “All We Can Save is a bestselling anthology of writings by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward.”
- Dr. Ayana Johnson’s TED talk on Finding your Climate Joy
- The “Nelson memo” from Dr. Alondra Nelson, US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research
- ASAPBio, a scientist-driven non-profit promoting transparency and innovation in life science communication
- Podcast: Eyes on Earth Episode 77 – ECOSTRESS and Urban Heat | U.S. Geological Survey (usgs.gov)
- Open your papers that have elapsed the embargo period using https://shareyourpaper.org/
- NASA Transform-to-Open-Science
- The NormCore Tech Conference on data & machine learning, grassroots organized around “topics you struggle with every day and makes you question why you do this job in the first place”
- Open Climate Fellowship program co-hosted via Open Environmental Data Project
- Semantic Climate Project
- Data Collaboration for the Blue Economy: The GovLab, Intertidal Agency, and Openscapes Host Studio on Data Stewardship and Governance Models for Data Sharing (Kate Wing and Julie Lowndes’ NSF data collaboratives work)
