Climate change needs open science

We are in the midst of a global information and knowledge crisis. Access to scientific research has never been more important to provide the basis for debates on critical issues such as climate change, global health, and renewable energies.

At ScienceOpen, we want to play our part here. We have built an automatically updating research collection on climate change for anyone and everyone. It has almost 7,500 research articles, each of which are Open Access. This means they are freely available for anyone to read, re-use, and share without restriction!

The collection already has 80,000 views, demonstrating the power of our collections features, and joins more than 150 others so far on ScienceOpen!

You can sort all articles in the collection by date of publication, average user rating, Altmetric score, citations, and read count. If you want to refine your search further, plug in some key words, and choose to sort by relevance. There are also 17 additional filters in the drop down menu, helping you to really zero in on essential research.

Depending how you sort all this research, you get a great choice of articles:

• Date: Histone H3 lysine 36 methylation affects temperature-induced alternative splicing and flowering plants
• Altmetric score (1804!): Assessing recent warming using instrumentally homogeneous sea surface temperature records
• Rread count: The role of local knowledge and traditional extraction practices in the management of giant earthworms in Brazil
• Citations: Sequencing and de novo analysis of a coral larval transciptome using 454 GSFIx

The next step is yours

With 7,500 articles, there really is something for everyone, no matter your views on climate change. We hope that users share, recommend, and comment or peer review articles, and use this as the basis for a valuable public knowledge resource for climate change. For example, you can send your favourite articles to your local policymakers, share them with your friends and colleagues, use them as the basis for a journal club, and more!

You can also use the collection as a saved search, and stay up to date with all the latest Open Access climate change research.

Authors of these articles can now use ScienceOpen to add non-specialist summaries to their articles, and make them more accessible to non-experts. This is a great way of boosting the impact of research, and making it easier for others to use for evidence-informed debates about climate change.

Top publishers for this collection include:

1. Public Library of Science (1,756)
2. Nature Publishing Group (575) (majority at Scientific Reports!)
3. BioMed Central (543)
4. Frontiers (383)
5. Blackwell Publishing (271)

We are incredibly thankful to these publishers for making the climate change research they publish Open Access. It is our collective responsibility to make sure that research like this is accessible to the public. We hope that this collection is useful for you in future discussions on climate change.

Are there any other topics you’d like to see us make these collections for? What other features would you like added? Let us know!