The Politics of Paleoclimate Data Access

Snyder, Walter S.¹, Kerstin Lehnert² (1) Boise State University, Boise, ID (2) Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, Palisades, NY

Paleoclimate research needs to become a shared effort by academia, industry, federal and state agencies. One way to build that community, and to reduce controversy, is to provide open access to all paleoclimate data and metadata. The debate about the dramatic surface temperature change (the 'hockey stick' graph) that lead to recent Senate hearings was fundamentally driven by lack of access to data. In addition, as expressed in other abstracts in this session, we need to better understand the deep-time paleoclimate record to be able to make better predictions about future climate change. These deep-time data, as well as the modern and near-time paleoclimate data, need to be freely available to all interested parties. However, the open access to scientific information has itself become a contentious issue. The US Congress is considering a law that would require all published literature to be made available for free within 6 months of publication, the notion being that this will promote better science and policy decisions based on science. A better approach is to focus on the data versus the written word. The written word can and should be copyrighted. This protects the viability of the journals of many societies - large and small - and therefore the viability of the societies and the science they support. Once the data are public, they may be reinterpreted and used as the basis for additional studies. The catch-22 to this solution is that we have to first construct a way to capture these data and make them available to all. Many of the government agencies that supply research funds already have data policies in place. What is required is the funding base to allow them to implement these policies in consultation with the communities that they serve.