Introduction to The Open Archaeobotanist Guest Blogs

Over this year, there are going to be a series of guest blogs by prominent Open Archaeologists to promote open science as an approach within Archaeology.

This series of guest blogs is to act as inspiration and motivation to our discipline to adopt more open ways of working.

Open Research has an overwhelming number of different aspects and we should not be thinking about adopting all of these at once. We should be starting by taking small steps towards an ultimate goal of a completely open culture of scientific research.

I think to encourage more archaeologists to follow this approach, we need to explain more about why and how we became open archaeologists to those that have not yet shifted their ideas and practices. It will also help to suggest what the small steps could be so that there are a series of concrete actions that could be taken.

The guest blog is based on a set of interview questions that can be found here. If you want to be a guest blogger, then please get in touch with me - ekaroune@googlemail.com or you can comment on this issue on the github repository for this blog here.

So, even though I have already written a post about why I want to be an open archaeologists, I thought it would be a good place to start if I answered the interview questions myself.

Why I am an Open Archaeobotanist.

Why did you become an Open Archaeologist?

I re-entered academia a few years ago after having a long break being a science teacher and I think my current focus on open science stems from the time I have spent teaching. Thinking back to when I did my PhD, I suppose I always had open science in my mind, even though it was not really a thing back then. I conducted a study during my PhD to try to reproduce a morphometric method used to identify rice phytoliths with little success - a reproducible crisis before the reproducibility crisis!

But teaching students about scientific methodology, and how scientists concentrate on scientific design to get valid results, feels like something I have to now live up to. When I did start back in academia and discovered the reproducibility crisis happening, I felt even more of a responsibility to practice what I had been preaching to those students.

The other thing that drives me forward is how hard it is for excluded groups such as women, especially mothers, people with disabilities and those from lower income countries to get a fair chance at an academic career. I really do think that open science can improve this situation as it places more value on diversity and inclusion in lots of different ways. Making sure that you share your research as openly as possible will have the greatest impact for you, on other researchers that can access it and doing this will make your research more sustainable. So by sharing, I do not just mean as scientific publications - I mean all types of scientific outputs and to as wide an audience as possible. That could be lay summaries, blogs, data, code, educational material and also more academic forms of writing.

How did you become an Open Archaeologist?

I definitely started off with a frustration at a lack of reproducibility in my own discipline and so started to teach myself about open science through online resources such as watching talks about open science and through the freely available courses on the FOSTER website.

I then really wanted to find out what was going on in my own discipline and so I dived into conducting a literature review to look at issues about open access and data sharing. That project led to me being involved in the Open Life Science Open Leadership Program and also becoming involved in The Turing Way. Now my regular day job heavily involves open science skills and promoting open ways of working and I have started to build a community of open practice in my discipline.

What is your biggest frustration at the moment in terms of the adoption of open science practices in archaeology?

Attitudes around data sharing - I am very happy for my data to be open from it’s point of collection but I know many people don’t hold this same view point. I have experience working in another field where data sharing is restricted because it is so sensitive but I do not think this applies routinely to archaeology. I think the issue is mostly about ownership of data in archaeology.

I know there are worries about getting scooped and this is hard to get past but I think that is a total myth. I suggest to prevent this from happening you can add a license and digital object identifier (DOI) to any data or other outputs you put in open repositories. This means other researchers can cite your work properly.

Also being more open about what research you are doing from the start of a project will also prevent scooping because everyone will know what research you are doing. If your work is known, with lots of examples of outputs in the public domain, it would be a bit strange if someone tried to do the same thing as you.

What is the most inspirational piece of open research you have seen lately?

For me, equity, diversity and inclusion fall very much under the umbrella of Open Research or Open Scholarship. I feel very strongly that Archaeology as a discipline needs to change in terms of diversifying the people involved, especially in the higher up positions such as University Professors.

On Monday this week it was International Women’s Day, so I want to highlight the work of Rachel Pope and the group she is the Director of - British Women Archaeologists. They are a lobby group for improving conditions for women workers in the Heritage Sector. Find out more on their facebook page here.

Rachel gave the most amazing speech this week called ‘Women in the present, women in the past’. It can be seen on youtube here. It highlighted the serious lack of women professors in British Archaeology, and even less women of colour in those positions, and how this has had serious implications on the interpretations of women in the past.

What one thing could archaeological researchers do to easily make their work more open?

Start to put your work in an open repository - there are many to choose from such as Zenodo or Open Science Framework. This could be your academic articles, data or any other outputs you might have. Don’t forget your license - a creative commons license, the most open being CC-BY 4.0, is a good one for documents.

Thanks for reading and watch out for the first guest blog coming very soon!

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