Celebrating joy in #BlackInPhysics week, open-access publishing supports climate justice

Physics World Weekly Podcast

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast we celebrate #BlackInPhysics week (24–28 October), which is an annual event that is dedicated to celebrating Black physicists and revealing a more complete picture of what a physicist looks like.

The theme for 2022 is “finding joy in the diverse Black community” and Physics World – together with Physics Today – is publishing a series of essays by Black physicists on this topic. In this podcast, two essayists, Joyful Mdhluli of South Africa’s University of the Witwatersrand and Larissa Palethorpe of the University of Edinburgh in the UK, talk about finding joy while doing their PhDs.

It is also International Open Access Week in the scholarly publishing community, and this year’s theme is “open for climate justice”. This podcast features an interview with the communication expert Rosalind Donald of the American University in Washington DC, who talks about her research on climate justice and the importance of open-access publishing in that field.

Donald has recently published an open-access paper that looks at on how communities in Miami, Florida, are experiencing and responding to the climate crisis. The research is described in Environmental Research: Climate. This journal is published by IOP Publishing, which has also put together a collection of open-access papers that are related to the UN sustainable development goals.