Climate Justice in Electronic Publishing: A New Approach Supporting Global South Participation

This article argues that the ways in which scholarly electronic publishing is currently carried out is inherently a climate injustice as it unnecessarily hinders participation by people from the Global South in the climate science discourse, which is further exacerbated by the reliance of publishers on PDF-oriented system architectures. We argue that mega-publishers and societies are responsible for the state of electronic publishing and hence for the resulting climate injustice. A new publishing model for electronic publishing is proposed, informed by the semantic web, hypermedia, and the software system designs of earlier technological visionaries who built and promoted global access to knowledge through granular indexing and linking. This new type of publishing remains unsupported in mainstream scholarly publishing, which renders the knowledge it contains almost unnavigable, especially in complex, fast-moving research domains such as climate science. We are members of the #semanticClimate open research group, led by young Indian scientists, and together we are working to implement this new model for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate reports. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) is the most authoritative summation of climate change scientific knowledge and influences the acknowledgment of climate justice globally in policy for addressing climate change. As do other research bodies, the IPCC uses conventional electronic publishing workflows (centered on the PDF), but this holds back its potential wider reach. Our research intends to demonstrate how such reports could be made more accessible. The research we present in this article includes a semi-automated literature search on the topic of “climate justice” and asks the following questions: What does the open access scholarly corpus know about this topic, and what is the shape of the discourse as it exists in this literature? In which papers and journals has the topic appeared, and reaching back several decades, how often have the term and related terms been mentioned? We will also demonstrate the open-source tools that we will use for future work to create the Climate Knowledge Graph (ClimateKG), which aims to make the IPCC report globally accessible. The research presented in this article covers an experiment carried out by the #semanticClimate team, which focused on searching and computationally retrieving the open access scholarly research corpus from Europe PubMed Central (6.9 million open access papers) as well as all 70 chapters of the AR6 held on GitHub as HTML with IDs. The outcome of this experiment is a first-round scoping exercise to create the Climate Justice Dictionary, which represents terms associated with climate justice collected from this open scholarly corpus over 20 years as well as from the IPCC report.