Open Access Week 2022 - Open for Climate Justice: About Open Access Week

SPARC defines open access as: "the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment.

“Open for Climate Justice” is the theme for this year’s International Open Access Week (October 24-30).

Climate Justice is an explicit acknowledgement that the climate crisis has far-reaching effects, and the impacts are “not be[ing] borne equally or fairly, between rich and poor, women and men, and older and younger generations,” as the UN notes. These power imbalances also affect communities’ abilities to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge around the climate crisis. Openness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them.

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.

International Open Access Week is a time to coordinate across communities to make openness the default for research and to ensure that equity is at the center of this work. Selected by the Open Access Week Advisory Committee, this year’s theme is an opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around how open enables climate justice. Open Access Week 2022 will be held from October 24th through the 30th; however, anyone is encouraged to host discussions and take action around “Open for Climate Justice” whenever is most suitable during the year and to adapt the theme and activities to their local context.

You can read more about the 2022 theme on the SPARC website.

This year, the Columbia University Libraries is proud to host the following events.

• Database Demo: EBSCO Research Databases for Climate Justice
  Monday October 17 12:30pm-1:30pm in Butler Library (RSVP here)

  • Join the Columbia University Libraries and EBSCO to review EBSCO’s authoritative research databases. With a nod to International Open Access Week 2022's theme, Open for Climate Justice, we will focus on databases that support climate justice initiatives, including GreenFILE, Sustainability Reference Center, and Environment Complete. We will discuss the best ways to refine search results and utilize the EBSCO platform's custom tools and functionality. We will also perform basic and advanced searches to discover scholarly articles from essential full-text journals, magazines, and trade publications. 

    This workshop is relevant to those who would like to learn about using research databases, maximizing searches on the EBSCO research databases platform and/or how to find scholarly work related to Climate Justice.

• Open for Climate Justice: Conversations with Columbia Climate School Researchers
  Wednesday October 26, 1pm-2pm, Virtual panel discussion
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  • The term "climate justice" reflects an explicit acknowledgement that the climate crisis has far-reaching impacts that are most often felt by communities with relatively few resources. These same communities often lack the means and the access needed to produce, disseminate, and use knowledge around the climate crisis. Openness in research on climate can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them. This panel discussion will highlight how “openness” factors into the work of Columbia researchers and their connections with the climate justice movement.
    
    Panelists:

    • Kytt MacManus, CIESIN
      Students Take the Driver's Seat in Drone-Enabled Geospatial Data Analysis
      https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/05/18/drone-enabled-geospatial-data-analysis/ 
      Students in MacManus's “Spatial Analysis for Sustainable Development,” course operated drones in Callicoon, NY to collect data and then map it using ARCGIS. Drones democratize access to data and enable daily high frequency measurements that eliminate the need to hire an external company and wait as long as multiple years for the data.
      
      Kytt MacManus is a GIS Developer at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), Columbia Climate School. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Undergraduate Special Concentration and Major in Sustainable Development and the M.P.A. in Environmental Science and Policy. Kytt has extensive experience with global dataset and web application development for the NASA Socio-economic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC), hosted by CIESIN.

    • Marco Tedesco, Lamont-Doherty
      A New Dataset Could Aid Climate Justice Research
      https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/08/19/a-new-dataset-could-aid-climate-justice-research/
      Tedesco developed a free data tool to explore issues at the crossroads of racial, social and climate justice. The Socio-Economic Physical Housing Eviction Risk (SEPHER) dataset integrates socio-economic information with natural disaster risks, other hazards, financial information from real estate databases and ethnicity, race and gender data. This is a case study of how climate change catalyzed gentrification in a Miami neighborhood.

      Marco Tedesco is a Lamont Research Professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and Adjunct Scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). He is also affiliated with the Data Science Institute, he is Affiliated professor at Sant’Anna School of Economics in Pisa, Italy and has been the Resident Scientist at the Columbia Business School for the past two years.  He is a fellow of the Explorers Club and a member of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, Equity Working Group. Dr. Tedesco received his Laurea degree and PhD in Italy, from the University of Naples and the Italian National Research Council. He then spent five years as a postdoc and research scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He moved to CCNY in 2008 as an Assistant Professor where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. During his time at CCNY, he founded and directed the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory and was a rotating Program Manage at the National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2015. In January 2016, he joined Columbia University. Dr. Tedesco’s research focuses on the dynamics of seasonal snowpack, ice sheet surface properties, high latitude fieldwork, dendrochronology, global climate change, its implications on the economy and real estate and climate justice. Dr. Tedesco led more than 10 expeditions to Greenland and to Antarctica, beside fieldwork in  many other places, including Iceland, Northern US, Canada, Italian Alps and more. He is the editor of the book “Remote Sensing of the Cryosphere” published by Wiley in 2015 and he is the author of the book “The hidden life of ice” originally published in 2018. The book has been translated in 7 languages and was selected by the Washington Post and by the National Geographic Traveler as one of the best 10 books of the year. 

  • Moderator: 

    • Alex de Sherbinin, CIESIN
      Alex de Sherbinin is the Deputy Director and a Senior Research Scientist at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), a spatial data and analysis center within the Columbia Climate School specializing in the human aspects of global environmental change.

• Film screening of THE CONDOR & THE EAGLE followed by virtual Q&A with Casey Camp-Horinek
  Friday October 28, 6pm-8pm in 501 Northwest Corner Building (RSVP here):
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  • THE CONDOR & THE EAGLE (2019)

    Directed by Sophie Guerra and Clement Guerra

    The documentary follows four environmental activists from Canada to the Ecuadoran Amazon to tell the story of the collective struggle of the Indigenous peoples of North and South America in their fight to protect the Earth from climate change and to advocate for global climate justice. With stunning photography, the story uncovers a spiritual renaissance for the four leaders and offers a reminder to the viewer of our deep interconnectedness with the Earth and one another.

    Running time 82 minutes 
     

Below are additional events that may be of interest: