Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Our Planet’s Climate is broken, but copyright stops us reading about it (unless you have 50,000 USD) « petermr's blog

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the draft of its report last week – http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/#.UkweFhDB_cg . It’s > 2100 pp and I have downloaded the whole lot and – with the help of my software – will read it. The simple conclusion is that Climate Change (or more drastic, the Breakdown of Climate) is real and supported by scientific evidence.  Many responsible and concerned citizens (at school, in policy making, in business, in planning, in environment… in fact YOU) will rightly want to read about it. And many of you will want, and would be able to understand, the scientific basis. Because we can all be scientists. The report is based on >9200 references, some from government departments, but many in the scholarly literature. And here’s the problem. Many of those references are behind a paywall.  I’ve manually followed the first 20 in Chapter 1. [We are planning an OKF Open-Science project to Crowdcraft the whole lot... Please join us http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2013-October/002764.html ] and I list them below. Some are books, though in electronic form, but many are paywalled behind profit and non-profit publishers. My rough estimate is that it would cost at least 100 USD to read the papers in these 20 refs. There’s nearly 10000 references so lets say it will cost 50, 000 USD for ONE concerned citizen to read the Climate literature. (of course that doesn’t allow reading references in references which is often required.) remember that this is what the UN, through its IPCC thinks are the most critical papers. Now it would technically be possible for the IPCC to copy these papers and post them. It makes technical sense as many are chapters in larger volumes. But the IPCC can’t do that as it would violate copyright. Yes, we cannot discuss the planet’s future responsibly because copyright is more important. I plan to read the 2100 page report by machine and see how it can be made more digitally tractable. For example I’d like to extract diagrams and turn them into tables – this makes it easier to re-run analyzes and make comparisons (anyone interested please let me know). And I’d like to extract data from those publications in the same way. But the publishers are strenuously trying to stop this. (More on this later) ..."