Open access to scientific information on climate crisis

Do we really want to lock original scientific information which is crucial for policy making behind paywalls, for example, in Springer’s journal “Nature Climate Change” [1]? Although the “Nature” brand may give scientific findings additional credibility and impact, this would mean that citizens, scientists, business leaders, and politicians, esp in poorer countries, will have less access to this kind of scientific information. Personally, I do not think this is in the public interest, and I do not recommend publishing original research on the climate crisis exclusively in paywalled journals, such “Nature Climate Change”, but (also) using open-access journals, such as PLoS ONE [2]. Springer itself started the open-access journal “Globalization and Health”, and even Elsevier has launched the open-access journal “The Lancet Global Health” [3], which indicates that this kind of publishing model may even work for profit-driven enterprises.

A discussion on the current struggles of public agencies in Sweden to disentagle from commerical publishes like Elsevier to provide open access to publicly funded research can be found here [4-7].

Aadditional help to access scientific information from closed access sources is provided below:

Alternative access to closed access scientific articles:
Browser Add-ons, which search for available publications:

References:
[1] https://www.nature.com/nclimate/
[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/issue/current
[4] https://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2018/07/01/alternative-routes-to-scholarly-articles-and-research-outputs/
[5] https://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/2019/01/16/elsevier-uppdatering/
[6] https://openaccess.blogg.kb.se/bibsamkonsortiet/avtalet-for-bibsamkonsortiet-med-elsevier-upphor-fragor-och-svar/
[7] http://www.lakartidningen.se/Aktuellt/Nyheter/2018/12/Slutstriden-om-open-access-i-Europa-narmar-sig/

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