The theme for International Open Access Week 2022 is both timely and apt: Open for Climate Justice. Addressing the climate crisis requires gathering of precise information and building reliable insights from different sources of knowledge. Climate researchers are at the forefront of this work and, therefore, this topic is of special significance to them.

What are some of the challenges they face when conducting their research? How can making climate research open access overcome some of these challenges? How do they decide which journals to publish their work in? Does having climate research openly accessible improve science communication to the general population and influence policy-making?

In this interview, I ask these questions to two climate researchers—Travis Tai and James Robinson—who are passionate about their work and have stressed on the importance of making climate research openly accessible. Watch the video to listen to their thoughts.

More about Travis Tai and James Robinson

Travis Tai is a climate change biologist and currently a post-doctorate researcher at the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium in Victoria, Canada. He is investigating how climate-driven changes to freshwater environments will affect salmon in the Pacific Northwest. The lifecycle of salmon varies by species and population, and therefore, the exposure to climate change will accumulate differently for each population. Travis largely uses open data for his research, most notably the hydrological modelling data produced by his institute, as well as government data and data from other salmon research initiatives.

James Robinson is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow with LEC REEFS, based at Lancaster University in the UK. He tries to uncover connections between marine ecosystems, fisheries, and food security, and he is particularly interested in understanding climate change impacts to coral reef fisheries. He uses lots of publicly available datasets—underwater surveys, fisheries catches, and nutrient food tables—and reproducibility and open science principles are incredibly important to his research.