Assessment of Open Science Practises in Phytolith Research shows we could do better!
- Post by: Doris Barboni
- October 16, 2020
- No Comment
Karoune, E., 2020. Data from “Assessing Open Science Practices in Phytolith Research”. Journal of Open Archaeology Data, 8(1), p.6. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/joad.67
This recently released data paper, and soon to be published research article (find the pre-print here), highlights a need for us as a community to move towards more open ways of working. The dataset was compiled from a review of 341 articles containing primary phytolith data from prominent archaeological and palaeoecological journals. It collected data on open access, data and metadata sharing. The results show that only 14% of the articles were gold open access and therefore few were accessible for all from the point of publication. It was then determined that 73% of the articles could be accessed somewhere on the internet and this particularly highlighted the positive use of academic social media sites for sharing. Data sharing in any form (so this could be tables in the text, supplementary data, or datasets in open repositories) was 53%. However, the majority of this data is not reusable due to it being behind a journal paywall, in a format not easily reusable or not being raw data. Meta data sharing was also found to need improvement and if we are to make our datasets fully accessible and reusable for other researchers, which should be the aim of our community, we still have a long way to go to meet data sharing best practice such as the FAIR principles.
If you want to know more about the project (Open Science in Phytolith Research) that comes from this research, please look at this website and join in with forthcoming forum discussions on this topic.
