Unbinding
In 2006, Peter Suber, the Senior Advisor on Open Access at Harvard University, proposed a strategy for ‘unbinding’ past research articles on a subject of urgent public need by making them open access.
As part of the Open Climate Campaign, we’re bringing this strategy to life by identifying foundational climate research that is locked behind a paywall and unbinding it.
Frontiers Planet Prize Paper
The Frontiers Planet Prize celebrates breakthroughs in sustainability science, rewarding solutions that show measurable potential to help humanity remain within the boundaries of the Earth’s ecosystem. Each year, a jury of 100 leading scientists vote for a list of national champions and then for three prize-winning international champions.
The Open Climate Campaign congratulates the 23 second edition national champions! Recognizing the importance of the science highlighted via the Frontiers Planet Prize, we’ve embarked on a mission to unbind all of the Frontiers Planet Prize papers so that they are available as open access.
Approach
The Open Climate Campaign reviewed the publishing rights of each Frontier Planet Prize paper to determine open access status and rights to deposit. Of the 23 papers in the second edition of the prize we found that:
- 61% of papers (14/23) are already available as open access with a CC BY license
- 35% of papers (8/23) are locked behind a paywall and are ready to be unbinded
- 4% of papers (1/23) is available as free access on the publishers website without a CC BY license
Using the Open Climate Campaign’s instance of the Share Your Paper tool, we checked each of the closed access papers to determine whether they could be deposited in an open repository, resulting in open access for these papers. As a result of strong OA policies via funders, national governments, and institutions, we are pleased to report that all of the closed access papers were eligible for deposit into an open repository.
With this information, we set out to contact the authors of the prize-winning papers directly, letting them know of the importance of open access for climate research and requesting a version of their author accepted manuscript for deposit.
Results
This Unbinding initiative is active and ongoing. We’d like to give our thanks to the authors who have sent us their author accepted manuscripts to ensure their research is available as open access. Check back regularly on our progress!
Coming Soon!
We will have other initiatives that targets the world’s most important climate research that will be launching in the fall.
