Data archiving and sharing survey

Open data sharing improves the quality and reproducibility of scholarly
research. Open data are defined as data that can be freely used, reused,
and redistributed by anyone. Open data sharing democratizes science by
making data more equitably available throughout the world regardless of
funding or access to other resources necessary for generating cutting-edge
data. For an interdisciplinary field like biological anthropology, data
sharing is critical since one person cannot easily collect data across
multiple domains. The goal of this paper is to encourage broader data
sharing by exploring the state of data sharing in the field of biological
anthropology. Our paper is divided into four parts: the first section
describes the benefits, challenges, and emerging solutions to open data
sharing; the second section presents the results of our data archiving and
sharing survey that was completed by over 700 researchers; the third
section presents personal experiences of data sharing by the authors; and
the fourth section discusses the strengths of different types of data
repositories and provides a list of recommended data repositories. The
data archiving and sharing survey and the raw data collected from the
survey are deposited here.