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 auth...