Climate: The Essential Role of Open Scientific Data for Protecting Our Coastlines

sustainability and resilience of our socioecosystems. Without objective knowledge, prejudices take precedence over reason and lead to generally ineffective, even counterproductive, or unjust development choices. This duel between knowledge and belief, progressivism and obscurantism, has existed for a long time but it has certainly taken a new dimension with the rise of the Internet and other new telecommunications technologies, and more recently artificial intelligence. These tools exponentially accelerated production and propagation of both knowledge and disinformation. And the fight is fierce.

For example, the recent decisions of the administration of the President of the United States Donald Trump, who in a few months undermined American research and by ricochet, global research, by cutting funding on subjects deemed “sensitive”, such as climate change or genres' study. In particular, data associated with these issues are gradually withdrawn from traffic, especially on the ocean, and traditionally hosted by federal agencies such as NOAA (for the ocean and the atmosphere) and NASA (for space).

But in terms of access to knowledge, Trump's United States is not an exception, or even the countries governed by extreme regimes. Even in France, many cases (contaminated blood, mediator, chlordecone, very recently Nestlé, etc.) show that any power may be tempted, for various reasons, to hide crucial information for the common good.

Beyond disinformation scandals, absence or insufficient information prevents any rational decision-making and limits our ability to reduce our impact on ecosystems. For example, it is difficult to manage fisheries permanently without data on the evaluation of fish stocks and their possible evolution with the climate.

In this context, scientific research has a key role to play as a producer of demonstrated and objective knowledge. It is still necessary to adopt good practices to make this knowledge accessible and usable.

Make knowledge accessible and reusable

The movement of open science, initiated in the early 1990s by Paul Ginsparg and its Open Arxiv archive, then appears essential to disseminate knowledge and put reason at the heart of the functioning of our societies.

Open science is based on a simple idea: knowledge from research must be accessible to everyone, whether it be publications, data, tools, models or methods. This transformation of scientific practices is a silent revolution that redefines relations between researchers, citizens, businesses and public decision -makers.

In practice, where are we on the ground today?

If we follow the European cloud plans for open science (EOSC) and the national plan for open science, the opening of data from research funded on public funds has been compulsory since 2016.

However, in 2023, only 25 % of French publications mentioning data produced reported their sharing, 19 % for codes and software. More generally, 34 % of researchers never publish their data.

If this trend is slightly increasing, a good part of the data produced in universities are never archived properly and, too often, sleep in hard drives.

Too much research data still sleep on hard drives

The cause? A non -learned mixture of technical, legal, economic and cultural obstacles, both individual and collective. In particular, there is an evaluation system of research more valuing publications than sharing data, and a competitive operating mode on project which pushes to self -evaluation and self -protection, in order to ensure a sustainable job, rather than to the opening of its work.

The sharing of data may be a practice intended to promote collective scientific progress, its adoption remains progressive and variable according to the disciplines. In order to remedy this, research and bodies that administer it must set up new mechanisms aligning individual and collective interests.

For example, the Urban & Coastal Lab project – La Rochelle, initiative of La Rochelle University, highlights these tensions and opportunities. In large part focused on the coastal territories, we set up a tool for shared data management, models, research methods, in order to promote interdisciplinarity and facilitate collaborations between researchers, as well as with other actors in the territory such as communities and citizens …

However, this work comes up against very real constraints and often Earth on Earth: lack of time, limited skills in data management, absence of institutional recognition, or fear of plagiarism. Opening is often perceived as an additional charge, rarely valued in the academic career.

Added to this is an asynchrony between research and operational, public or private decision: the actors need immediate answers, when research produces long time data.

Thus, it is not simply the project, nor only its motivations or its conduct, which reveal these tensions and opportunities, but rather the more global context in which it takes shape.

Open data, a question of means

IT infrastructure, online services, storage spaces, documentation, logistics, financial and energy costs (for example to make interoperable files of large files interoperable), and we go – open research has a material and financial cost.

Who pays for the servers? Who keeps the platforms? And how to guarantee the quality and readability of data so that it is really reusable?

Behind the acronym Fair (feasible, accessible, interoperable, reusable), often cited as giving the fundamental principles of open science (found, accessible, interoperable, reusable), hides complex and substantial work of annotation, normalization, classification and documentation.

This is where tools such as data management plans, which have become compulsory in certain national or European projects are used. They allow to anticipate the questions around the life cycle of data, since their collection in sharing by going through their formalization and their storage. However, they are often perceived as an administrative formality (not to say constraint), for lack of adapted training and support, among other reasons.

Is it time to change the rules of the game?

Several levers are identified to accelerate the movement of open science: modify the research evaluation criteria to consider data sharing as a key scientific performance indicator; Develop training so that researchers are better equipped; Train specialists in open science (engineers, analysts, computer scientists, archivists, etc.); finance lasting storage and dissemination infrastructure, interoperable between disciplines; And above all, rethink the link between science and society, facilitating access to data for citizens, public authorities, communities, NGOs, businesses, etc. – In short, all those who wish to learn more about the world.

Scientific data is certainly the fruit of research work, but their usefulness and their possible reuse fields exceed the academic sphere. Data from public funding should not be considered as a private good, but as a common good … knowing that it must at the same time be protected.

To this end, opening your data and putting it on open warehouses is a way to protect it and protect yourself. This makes it possible to make their origin public (the work of researchers is thus notoriously recognized) and to associate them with licenses conditioning their use (which prevents their diversion) and a DOI (unique identification number for digital products).

The paradigm change towards open science must be carried by the universities, supported by the funders and driven by the researchers themselves. It is a question of making science open more attractive and rewarding.