Last December marked the end of the longest contract for Open By Default as the Open Climate Data project at Creative Commons winds down (see also launch post). For 19 months I consulted as a Research analyst with them. In this blog post I will focus on what I helped with.
The assignment was focused on desk research, building upon the Landscape analysis they already had done when I entered the project. My work was using the data in it, as well as updating, extending, and adding to it. By analyzing the situation of each stakeholder and where they were in their open data journey, we could understand how to help who and engage with them in a customized way.
This leads us in to the next large task, assisting in implementing the Recommendations for Better Sharing of Climate Data in organizations producing, storing, or reusing such data. We often gave a deep dive into the Creative Commons licenses before giving advice on how Policy, Platform and Practice could be improved to be aligned with the recommendations.
As we worked globally, the need for translations made itself clear and I got to coordinate the volunteer translators. The recommendations are now available in Arabic, Chinese, French, Portuguese and Spanish as well as the original English.
All along the project, we also gave a lot of presentations to disseminate our recommendations find more implementation partners. I had the pleasure to present at conferences in person in England, Scotland, Italy and France as well as a handful of times virtually. Huge thanks to Creative Commons for allowing travel by train, which felt extra important considering the project.
The final part of the project was to generalize the recommendations from focusing on climate data to any scientific data. The launch of that report and a summary of the entire project can be found in the blog post Licensing Best Practices for the Sharing of Scientific Data.
Two small side outputs that are worth mentioning. In another project about preprints, Creative Commons along with ASAP Bio wanted to create an article on Wikipedia to fill the knowledge gap of preprint licence policies at research funders. I helped wikify their drafts, making sure sources were there and finally publishing it and linking to it in the appropriate places, and, perhaps most importantly, doing all this in accordance with Wikipedia’s policies on paid editing. You can find it on List of research funders by preprint licensing policy.
The second output is an interactive Creative Commons license compatibility visualizer. As it is very common to reuse climate data and often in many steps of refining, building upon and aggregating sources, having legal interoperability of the sources becomes important. In order to show how more restrictive licenses reduce the options for reusers I built a small tool to play around with. One can select all the licenses of the incoming data and the tool shows what possible choices of the combined data is available. Check out the the Creative Commons License Compatibility Checker.
