Open letter to IEA and member countries requesting open data

Open data
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I will endeavor to keep this posting up‑to‑date. The revision history can be inspected by clicking on the either orange or gray pencil icon located above and right. Note too that you can link to individual headings within the posting by mousing over the heading, then the link icon, and finally clicking to bring up the required URL.

Release: 18

Summary of events

The first two sections provide some background. The final section covers some unanswered questions.

The International Energy Agency

The International Energy Agency (IEA) was established in 1974 in the wake of the 1993 oil crisis and is headquartered in Paris, France. The location is material because this will, in the first instance, determine which national law governs the datasets that the IEA makes available to the public.

The IEA collects national energy statistics from its 30 member countries and from elsewhere and each year publishes the World Energy Outlook under full copyright. The IEA also releases specialist reports from time‑to‑time, such as this (commendable) net‑zero roadmap:

Data context

Until recently, the IEA policy on the data it collects and processes was to hold that data behind a paywall and then on‑sell it to commercial entities to generate revenue — a practice that naturally prevents important information from reaching researchers, NGOs, and citizens located in both the global north and the global south investigating carbon mitigation options for their energy sectors and allied sectors.

On a very few occasions, the IEA did also release supporting datasets under non‑open public licenses. For instance and related to the publication cited immediately above:

In this particular case, the datasets are available at no charge under a Creative Commons CC‑BY‑NC‑SA‑3.0‑IGO license for non‑commercial use — a puzzling choice of legal instrument for at least three reasons that lie beyond the scope of this posting, except to say that the offered license is legally immiscible with the well established CC‑BY‑4.0 license and that use of CC‑BY‑NC‑SA‑3.0‑IGO effectively creates a license‑bound data silo.

Initial campaign

Hannah Ritchie from Oxford University and head of research at Our World in Data (OWID) started the ball rolling on open data with a scientific letter and a follow‑up blog:

The blog encouraged readers to contact their energy ministries and seek both an open data policy and additional funding to make up for the resulting shortfall in revenue from lost data sales. The annual IEA “funding gap” was estimated by Roser and Ritchie (2021) to be “5 to 6 million EUR” (5.7–6.8 million USD).

Openmod participants add support

After reading the OWID blog, @MalteSchaefer, Braunschweig, Germany coordinated an open letter to the IEA and its member countries — signed by 37 researchers who also participate in the informal Open Energy Modelling Initiative (openmod) community. The openmod numbers something like 400 energy system analysts. That letter:

The public version with some names omitted (due to a mix up when processing consents) and some names added after‑the‑fact is located at the start of this thread — a total of 52 energy researchers lent support to the open letter:

A day or so later, The Guardian newspaper ran the following story on that open letter:

Several signatories on the open letter also wrote to their national governments and, to date, two have received replies, namely from ministries in Germany (above) and Switzerland. In both cases, the respective ministries supported the pre‑policy-change status quo of paywalled data and the ad‑hoc use of non‑commercial public licenses. That latter strategy that can provide for limited transparency but not for unrestricted modification, circulation, and re‑use. In other words, a strategy that clearly fails the doctrines of open science, as articulated here (under path 2):

IEA executive director in Washington

At about the same time as the open letter, IEA executive director Fatih Birol was in Washington to meet with US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and other key people:

Misreporting that IEA board endorses open data

An energy market analysis website reported and then retracted an updated IEA policy decision on data provisioning (this log was updated on 7 February and a quote by Fatih Birol duly removed, that second URL also uses the publication date for the first URL but came later):

Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser also blogged about these developments — which should be read in light of the subsequent correction by QCI:

Increasing media coverage

Mid‑January brought increasing media coverage — the story being picked up, in the main, by specialist websites. For instance:

In that particular article, Barry McMullin, who supported the original open letter, is quoted as saying:

Barry McMullin is an engineering professor at Dublin City University in Ireland. He told Climate Home News: “Our focus is on energy system decarbonisation at a national level. An element of that is trying to downscale IEA global scenarios and figure out whether or how well they align with our more bottom up/local national analysis … having unencumbered access to the IEA datasets (and ultimately to their models!) will certainly facilitate us in this kind of study.”

Campaign shifts to United States

In mid‑January, the campaign migrated to the United States, led by Adam Stein from the Breakthrough Institute. A similar open letter was drafted for US‑based non‑governmental organizations (rather than individuals) to sign on in support:

The finalized letter was officially forwarded to the IEA on or about 3 March 2022:

IEA Ministerial meeting postponed 7 weeks

On 27 January, the IEA Ministerial meeting originally scheduled for 2–3 February 2022 in Pittsburgh, USA was rescheduled to 23–24 March 2022 in Paris, France:

An official tweet four days later explained that challenges related to organizing in‑person meetings during the covid pandemic were material:

As a consequence, the Breakthrough Institute extended the closing date for its US‑based campaign until 17 February.

Update

An environmental news site based in New York updated events on 7 February. Among other things, they indicate that the lost revenue, when split evenly among member countries, amounts to USD $265 000 per year.

The question is not simply one of cash flow. Governments supplying primary information will also need to consent to a suitable open license — most likely the Creative Commons CC‑BY‑4.0 attribution license.

Data provision

Given that the IEA member countries do commit to CC‑BY‑4.0 data licensing, the question then arises as to whether the IEA should develop its own public‑facing data portal. Or whether an open science hub — perhaps located in Europe or the United Kingdom — would provide a better venue? Irrespective, considerable public money will be required to variously initiate and stock a data portal. IEA member countries should consider also covering this expenditure at their upcoming meeting.

Funding paradigms

On 24 January, head of the World Health Organization (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for a paradigm shift in the way that organization is funded. That same sentiment would apply equally to the IEA given present arrangements.

IEA member country decision (postponed)

The next meeting of the IEA member countries is now scheduled for 23–24 March 2022. And that meeting, known as an “IEA Ministerial”, will likely decide whether to either endorse or reject this new policy on open data from the IEA board. For background on that forthcoming meeting:

Official communique from 2022 IEA Ministerial meeting

The 23–24 March 2022 meeting in Paris, France took place as planned. The only participant to mention data (that I noticed, but I did not watch the entire event) was Fatih Birol, who said during his opening remarks:

“… and finally related to each of these three priorities we also would like to start making IEA data freely available, in the interest of increasing data transparency and supporting good decision making”

And here is a link to the video recording:

Following the meeting, the IEA released this communique:

Point 33 reads (emphasis added):

“We task the Governing Board to organize an independent review of the IEA budget, standing groups, and committees to inform the 2025-2026 Programme of Work and Budget. We also ask for a review of options that will allow more IEA data to be made freely available while offsetting any budgetary implications.”

It should be noted that “freely available data” and “open data” are different concepts legally speaking. Taking a legally conservative view, only data with suitable open licenses can be safely republished in original or modified form for others to use and benefit from.

IEA follow-up on twitter

The IEA head of the communications and digital office, Jad Mouawad, followed up on twitter:

This is a big step forward for @​IEA and we now have our work cut out for us to come up with options and resources to ensure that we can provide free data and increase transparency to the market as part of this new ministerial mandate.

And shortly thereafter:

I can’t answer on timing yet. There’s a bit of technical work on our end to get this right and we’re eager to do so. We also have to find solutions to ensure our financial stability as data sales account for about a quarter of our regular budget. But we have a mandate to do so …

Unanswered legal questions

There has been no indication of which licenses the IEA board proposes to use. But I would strongly favor CC‑BY‑4.0 for the datasets themselves and CC0‑1.0 for associated metadata and including cataloging information.

It should also be noted that the IEA datasets released under any kind of public license are highly unlikely to attract intellectual property protection under United States law in any case. That take is based on US Copyright Office (2017) §727.1 (page 47) and surrounding points:

The advice therein supports the view that once IEA datasets become publicly available within the United States, they are effectively public domain and any restrictions — say on commercial usage — cannot be legally enforced under US law. Furthermore, those datasets can then be legitimately added to and made available from a server located within the United States under CC0‑1.0 notices and used to supply researchers in other jurisdictions, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Rwanda, Uganda, and South Africa for instance.

That assessment, albeit speculative, means that the “dual” model of paywalled data and non‑commercial public data (as advocated by, among others, the German BMWi ministry here) cannot work in practice. Commercial organizations would simply opt to source from the previously described public server. And indeed, material on that public server is more likely to be subject to scrutiny, curated, better documented, and also translated into other data formats, and — as a consequence — of generally higher quality and re‑usability than the original source.

The IEA may have a weak case against our hypothetical server operator under French law, but I doubt if it would embark on civil litigation in this context. I say that because a roughly analogous situation exists between the ENTSO‑E Transparency Platform and the US‑based World Resources Institute (WRI) and those facts have not resulted in legal action under Belgium law.

Of course, if the IEA does opt for CC‑BY‑4.0 licensing in the first place, this would have much the same effect (and would be preferable). It is now up to IEA member countries to support the recent (and laudable) reversal on IEA data policy by Fatih Birol and the IEA board.

Further developments

This blog covers the arguments for open licensing:

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