Sharing Mortuary Data

Presentation by Esther Plomp on the 20th of January 2022 for the Developments in Mortuary Archaeology symposium organised by ARCHON, University of Groningen and Leiden University.

Data sharing is part of the recent developments in opening up scientific research (a movement also known as Open Science/Scholarship). By opening up more aspects of research than just the final output in the form of a publication, the transparency of scientific research can be increased, reproducibility of results may be improved, and smaller datasets may be more easily combined so that new research questions can be addressed. Opening up the scientific process also promotes equitable access to resources and allows for the recognition of outputs other than the traditional scientific publication, such as data, code and analysis protocols. Many funders (for example, the European Commission, NWO, and Wellcome) and publishers (such as the American Journal of Physical Anthropology) now also require researchers to share the data underlying publications whenever possible. This presentation will go deeper into ethical considerations of data sharing, why data sharing is beneficial, and highlights tools that facilitate data sharing following recommended practices.