Let’s celebrate Earth Day as the Age of Open Science

Abstract

As Earth Day approaches, a day dedicated to both raising environmental awareness and celebrating environmental action, it can sometimes seem that there is more to worry about than to celebrate. Environmental awareness on Earth Day often involves spreading science-based knowledge about global change, but that can be discouraging as it involves things such as mass extinction, climate change, and emerging diseases.

These and other global change factors—such as invasive species, pollution, and habitat degradation—collectively threaten Earth’s ability to stay within the safe planetary operating space it has maintained throughout human history (1). The downside of focusing on all this is that it seems like Earth’s end times are near, and this fuels environmental doomsday prophecies and environmental nihilism. Hard to celebrate environmental action if environmental awareness overwhelms us.

In the midst of all this environmental change, however, there is something to cheer: The extraordinary rise in open access, freely available science that sheds light on global environmental problems and their solutions. Ever since the emergence of open access, making science freely available has been on the rise. Today, a majority of publications (~57%) offer some level of open access (2). For environmental awareness and action, this is huge.