We are excited to host COAR Executive Director Kathleen Shearer presenting an update on the Paper Pledge for the Planet, a COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) and Creative Commons initiative.
In October 2024, COAR, EIFL, and regional, national, and institutional partners – in collaboration with the Open Climate Campaign – launched a global effort to make climate change literature openly available to the world. The Paper Pledge is working with hundreds of institutions to significantly increase the reach and readership of this critical knowledge.
Many climate change articles are not currently available beyond subscribers of an academic journal. The aim of the project is to greatly increase the impact of climate change papers by depositing them into open access repositories. The initial focus of the project (fall 2024-winter 2025) targeted the over 3,700 climate change articles that have been published in the last 5 years that are closed access, but can be made openly available because of the journal self-archiving policies.
This information session will present the status of the project to date, allow participants to share success stories and challenges. It will also be an opportunity to provide input regarding of the next phase of the project, which will start in May/June 2025.
Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR, has been a prominent figure in open access, open science, scholarly communications, and research data management for close to 20 years. Over the past 15 years, she has worked through COAR to build a truly global coalition of repositories and repository networks, ensuring that repositories are recognized as critical infrastructure for open science in national and continental policies; and that repositories innovate and adopt good practices. Based in Montreal, Canada, she actively contributes to numerous organizations working to advance open science at a global scale including the Research Data Alliance, UNESCO Open Science Working Groups as well as numerous regional organizations such as the LIBSENSE Africa and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. One of her major achievements has been leading COAR’s Next Generation Repositories and the COAR Notify initiatives, which have set new standards and practices to enhance repositories’ functionality to meet the needs of the open science in the future, including repositories playing a more prominent role in the diamond OA ecosystem via the “Publish, Review, Curate” model of scholarly publishing.