A thank you note to funders for making my Nature Cities paper open-access

Publishing a paper is one thing. Making sure people can actually access, use, and build on it is another.

One thing that was important to us with our recent Nature Cities paper was that the work should not simply end up sitting behind a paywall or remain as a PDF that only a small group of people ever sees.

I am therefore very happy that the paper is fully open access, and the underlying City Segment Morphological Deprivation (CSMD) data and code are openly available as well.

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The dataset contains results for 5,132 cities across 103 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, allowing others to explore, test, compare, validate, question, and hopefully build further on what we have done.

Making the paper open access was made possible through financial support from Faculty of Health, Science and Technology (HNT) of Karlstad University, Centrum för forskning om samhällsrisker (CSR) and DEPRIMAP project funded by Formas, a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development. I am very grateful for that support. Open-access publishing is expensive, and having institutional and project support makes a real difference in ensuring that research can actually reach beyond the people who already have journal access.

The full dataset is available openly on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/20486977

For anyone who simply wants to explore the results without downloading the data, we also have a web viewer: https://saiga143.github.io/csmd-viewer

For us, the most interesting part now is seeing what others do with it.

Use it. Test it. Compare it with what you know locally. Find where it works, where it does not, and tell us what we should improve next.