The theme of Open Access Week 2022 of Open for Climate Justice provided the opportunity to engage with a highly diverse group of research professionals and advocates from our region and from around the world, and in particular people from the island nations of the Pacific, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and South East Asia. We were thrilled with the calibre and engagement of our events.
We would really like to thank our wonderful guest panellists including Australia’s Chief Scientist Dr Cathy Foley, Dr George Slim, from the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, Aotearoa New Zealand and Prue Torrance from the NHMRC. We appreciate all who gave us their time and expertise, sharing their knowledge in areas as diverse as science journalism, citizen science, supporting vulnerable communities, Creative Commons, climate data, open repositories, Wikipedia, and the hackers who built a soon-to-be-minted Open Climate Resource for teachers.
We began our programme asking how could open science support vulnerable communities in the Pacific, and went on a tour of the shifting landscapes in Open Access in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. With a view to producing a working open access guide on climate for teachers, our Tuesday & Friday crowd-sourced hacking sessions proved popular and fruitful, with a new resource on its way. Some of the most eye-opening discussions came from the climate journalism panel which explored the barriers to raising awareness of the climate crisis in our closest Pacific nations. The session on open access myths in the first Thursday session was lively and provocative, then in the second Thursday session we saw how community engagement via citizen scientists can provide vital policy changing data. We wrapped up the week tackling open access’s role in tackling real world climate injustice and, in the final session, discussed the role of Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia platforms in sharing climate research.
Engagement with our programme of events was excellent with more than 1250 registrations and more than 730 attendees. The website, including the OA Week event page, had more than 2.5k page views for the week, with more than 1.1k users. Twitter was once again buzzing with the #OpenForClimateJustice & #OAWeek hashtags, and our events clocked more than 37k tweet impressions across the week.
Our sessions could not run as smoothly as they did without the support of the organisers and the session chairs (Kim Tairi, Claire Thorpe, Ginny Barbour, Dimity Flanagan, Danny Kingsley, Alice Motion, Luqman Hayes, Thomas Shafee) who ran each panel with enthusiasm & gusto.
The recordings of each of our events are now available here on our website.
Members of the Open Access Australasia 2022 OA Week committee (missing Kate Davis & Thomas Shafee)
We would like to thank this year’s fantastic organising committee, very ably led by Richard White from the University of Otago; Luqman Hayes, Auckland University of Technology; Donna Coventry, Auckland University of Technology; Sara Roberts, University of Canterbury; Natalie Mudd, University of the Sunshine Coast; Zachary Kendal, University of Melbourne who was also our star graphics designer; Anna Du Chesne, Charles Sturt University; Thomas Shafee, Swinburne University; Kate Davis, Council of Australian University Librarians; Ginny Barbour, Open Access Australasia; Sandra Fry, Open Access Australasia.
We also take heart in the fact that so many more events were held at institutions around Australasia and the world to advocate for open access and to tie in with this year’s theme.