IEA plea - follow up

[Malte Schäfer]

Hi everyone,

A follow-up on my last email (see gray text below) regarding the plea to the IEA and its member countries to remove paywalls from their data and license them accordingly. I will try to keep the number of emails on this topic at a minimum, in order to not crowd your inboxes.

Thank you to all of you who have contributed already, by signing the letter, providing feedback on the draft, and indicating that they have a contact person who they would be willing to send the letter to.

We are still looking for people who'd like to contribute in any way (signing, drafting, forwarding). If you're interested, feel free to get in touch with me.

I've copied over the draft of the open letter into a Google Document to make collaboration easier:

Link to Google Doc

Everyone using this link should have commenting rights. If not, please do let me know. If you would like to have additional editing rights, please also let me know.

I will be collecting feedback on the draft until Sunday, November 28th, 23:00 h (CET). After that, I will finalize the formatting of the letter, and ask all signatories whether they agree with the final letter. Then, I plan to submit the letter through all the channels I will have identified until then (i.e. direct contacts and official contact emails of the IEA and member governments). Finally, I will inform you on this mailing list about the final letter submitted, including signatories.

If you have any suggestions, regarding the process, the content of the letter, or anything else, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Best,

Malte Schäfer

Original mail:

Hi everyone,

Motivated by a recent article at Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/iea-open-data), I have begun working with Robbie Morrison to draft an open letter to the IEA and the governments of its member countries. We, just as the authors of the OWID article, would welcome it if the IEA were to make all of its datasets publicly available.

A draft of this letter is attached to this email - I hope I covered all formats that you find easy to work with. If not, please do let me know.

From you, the openmod community, we would like to ask three things:

1) Would you like to help us in drafting the letter?

2) Would you like to sign the letter?

3) Would you like to forward the final letter to "your" government, if it is a member county of the IEA?

For those considering one or multiple points, below some details on each of them.

1) Drafting

We're looking forward to receiving your feedback on this letter - what did we miss, what should we change, what should we leave out? What do you think of the notion in general? Can you perhaps add some relevant references?

The letter is by far not final, so please feel free to suggest major and minor changes. Also, I'm not an English native speaker, so don't hesitate to let me know where my wording is off. Finally, the formatting is not final either, and since Robbie and I work with different text editors, this may show in some places. We seek to fix this before we submit the final version.

2) Signing

If you are interested in signing the letter, please provide us with the following information:

• your full name
• academic title (if applicable)
• the organization you work at
  
• one sentence about what you are working on (ideally, this would directly relate to IEA data in some way)

The final letter will refer to the openmod community, but ultimately it will be submitted in the names of the signatories only.

3) Forwarding

If you are interested in forwarding the final letter to "your" government (the government of the country you are from and/or of the country you currently reside in/work at), and if this country is a member country of the IEA (https://www.iea.org/countries), please let us know. Probably the best recipient would be the energy ministry (or equivalent) of your country. If you have a government contact person within your professional network, sending the letter to them would probably increase the likelihood of the letter having an impact. If you do, and you want to share this information with us, we would greatly appreciate it (with or without naming the contact explicitly). Finally, I think that a "high status person" (e.g. professor) submitting the letter may also increase the chances of the letter having an impact. (Not that I prefer it that way, just my expectation).

Next steps

I will collect your feedback and draft the final version of the letter. The goal is to draft a final letter by the end of November. I will work with Robbie to have all the formatting smoothed out by then, and probably he can also support me in the publishing process.

So much for now. I probably missed a lot of things or got them wrong, so I am looking forward to your feedback! Many thanks to Robbie for his initial draft and ongoing input and support.

Best,

Malte

[Robbie Morrison]

Hello all

To encourage everyone on this list to consider signing the aforementioned open letter to the International Energy Agency (IEA) on data availability and licensing.  The draft letter also contains a nice mix of legal and economic analysis.

You need not be tenured staff or employed in industry to support this letter either — you can be an undergrad student or a PhD candidate or be working in the private sector. And you don't need to reveal your affiliation either, just indicate your research interests or areas of work if you need to be vague.

Also to note that Malte and I plan to add a copy of letter — but without the list if signatories — to the openmod forum for archival purposes. The list of signatories would be replaced with the following statement instead:

"00 signatories from a range of institutions and organizations from the following countries: Germany, New Zealand, Mars, ..".

And perhaps we should also consider uploading a truncated PDF to zenodo, again without the list of signatories? That would attract a DOI and make the document easier to cite going forward.

Once the IEA letter is finalized, I will circulate some boilerplate that signatories might wish to use to generate their covering letters when contacting their own national governments.  Those representations would seek the necessary changes in funding to keep the IEA financially viable in the absence of proprietary data licensing revenues.

Finally, my personal appreciation to Max Roser and Hannah Ritchie from the United Kingdom for raising this matter in the first place:

• https://ourworldindata.org/iea-open-data
• https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-021-02691-4/d41586-021-02691-4.pdf

with best wishes, Robbie

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