Creative Commons Recommended Best Practices for Better Sharing of Climate Data

In this presentation, we explore the pivotal recommendations for climate data sharing developed by Creative Commons in collaboration with leading organizations including the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), NASA, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), and the World Resources Institute (WRI). Our focus is on enhancing the accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of climate data through comprehensive legal and licensing terms and the strategic use of metadata values centered on attribution.

Given the urgency of addressing the climate crisis, our recommendations are designed to advance the goals of EMS 2024 by providing actionable guidelines for data managers, researchers, and policymakers. These guidelines aim to maximize the impact of climate data sharing by ensuring that data is both open and usable, thus fostering more effective climate research and policy development.

Our recommendations, the result of a nine-month collaborative effort, mark a significant step forward in improving the accessibility and reuse of climate data. We offer two primary licensing options: Option A, which utilizes CC0 plus an attribution request to dedicate data to the public domain while requesting attribution, and Option B, which employs CC BY 4.0 to maintain data ownership with enforceable attribution. These options address common challenges related to license stacking and attribution stacking, providing clear pathways for managing multiple climate data sources.

Additionally, we propose standardized metadata values that enhance both human and machine readability, ensuring greater transparency and reducing ambiguity in data sharing. By building on existing metadata schemas and standards, our recommendations aim to fill critical gaps by standardizing the inclusion of essential information related to attribution, licensing, and provenance.

Effective climate data management is further supported by our emphasis on four key practices: appointing dedicated technical and legal/policy stewards, encouraging collaborative data sharing, and regularly updating data sharing policies in line with evolving open data standards.

We invite attendees to engage with these recommendations and contribute to an ongoing dialogue on best practices for climate data sharing. By working together, we can drive forward innovations in climate research and enhance our collective ability to tackle the climate crisis. For further information and to access the full report and summary, please visit the provided links or contact us at openclimatedata@creativecommons.org.