Do-a-thon: Document closed models with public funding

We’ve discussed in the past documenting how public money maps to model development:

In particular, we could highlight how some projects funded with public money do not release their code or data to other researchers or the public at large. Or more aggressively put: naming and shaming those institutions using public money to develop proprietary models.

We’ve tried at openmod mostly to work with the carrot (Zuckerbrot), i.e. pointing to the benefits for all sides of open modelling. This would mark a shift (perhaps ill-advised) to using the stick (Peitsche) to embarrass institutions to open up.

We could for example:

  • Go through high profile energy modelling projects funded by the German government in enArgus and see what modelling outputs are open.
  • Or in reverse: For a given closed model, work out how much public money has funded its development.
  • Calculate numbers for how much public money ends up in closed versus open models.

This is perhaps too aggressive and may be counter-productive - I’d be interested in reactions.

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perhaps we can find a way (like blog or hashtag) to publish and discuss these in the future as well. that everytime when you see something like that again, you can get rid of your “bad emotions” by submitting a small post… perhaps even with the invitation to the authors to comment on that…