Why I want to be an open archaeobotanist?

The simple answer to this question is why not?

Research should be shared. As researchers we are often funded by public funds and it’s therefore something that we should be doing naturally or should be mandated to do by funders. The goal of open science is to increase the transparency and reproducibility of research so we should try to contribute to this by making our own research more open.

The harder question is when should we share our research?

Often this happens close to the end of the research lifecycle but I think that we should be sharing our research throughout. Being open from the start of the research lifecycle will have much more impact for your research. This is often called an Open Workflow (see the diagram below). It’s also important to share research in different ways as it is often relevant to diverse audiences. For example, within the academic community as a research article, to different specialist audiences outside of our field through talks at different conferences and also to lay audiences by writing lay summaries or blogs.

open research impact

What should we be sharing?

Everything and anything. All the research you do might be interesting and useful to other researchers or the general public. This could be writing applications for funding calls, developing new methods and reflecting on their implementation and also publishing your research articles, hopefully initially as pre-prints. All you really need to consider is do you have the permission to share it. If it’s your own work and does not contain any confidential information then it’s your choice to share or not.

Increasing open access to research activities, not just publications, will allow for greater diversity and inclusion, which can only be a good thing. Collaboration, especially from diverse groups of people, brings with it more ideas and therefore more innovation to progress scientific research.

Why don’t you have a look at your own research and try to assess how open it is. Then try to improve one area to make it more open.

What can you do to open up your research:

  • Release a pre-print of your next article into an open repository.
  • Write a blog about the research you are doing at the moment.
  • Put your data into an open repository.
  • Ask for the data if you are doing a review.
  • If you are not sure about where to start, go and find something to read. You could start by looking at the FOSTER website.

You can cite this blog by using this citation:

Emma Karoune, Esther Plomp, & Jennifer Bates. (2021, July 2). EKaroune/The-Open-Archaeobotanist: The Open Archaeobotanist blog October 2020 to July 2021 (Version v1.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5062417