Last year, thanks to your support, we successfully raised enough funds on Giving Tuesday to outfit our research vessel with a marine radar for improved safety on the water. This year, we are asking for your assistance in covering open access publication fees to ensure our peer-reviewed publications can be freely accessible to all!

Traditionally, scientific journal articles are published behind a paywall, only available to subscribers of that specific publication. More recently, there are increasingly options to publish your work open access, but at an increased fee to the authors. This typically costs thousands of dollars per journal article! While expensive, at OBI our philosophy is that science should always be openly available both to scientists and non-scientists. The only way we can learn more about and collaborate on behalf of the whales is for the information we collect and results we discover to be free for everyone to read. 

Our next publication will be the landmark paper we set out to write when we started the Orca Behavior Institute: a Southern Resident killer whale behavioral budget comparison from the 1970s to the modern day, looking at changes in how they spend their time in the central Salish Sea. This paper is currently under review and will be published in 2026, with open access fees in excess of $4k, our fundraising goal.

Thanks to a very generous donor, all donations up to $4000 made in honor of Giving Tuesday will be matched dollar for dollar, ensuring that we will be able to afford open access publication for at least one subsequent publication as well! 

At OBI we believe in the power of community science: anyone can participate in the scientific process regardless of their background or expertise. Our whale sightings tracking data is just one example of that! This, we feel, is another prime example. Science produced for the people, by the people. Your contributions will ensure that our Southern Resident behavior research will be freely available to all. Thank you so much for your support.