Open Practices in Phytolith Research: A Community Survey

Abstract

The open research movement has gained momentum in the last decade and no academic can ignore the necessity to make research more open, as it improves reliability, sustainability and reusability of data. In this paper, we present the results of a community-based survey concerning the extent to which open practices are known and applied within the phytolith research community. The survey covered aspects of research including the use of open source/access software and the open publication of data and papers. The answers of 81 participants show that ≥50% use open source/access software in their research, 40.7% know or use open repositories (not necessarily DOI-based), and 37% and 60.5% are predisposed to or have published gold open access and green open access/preprints, respectively. Among respondents with publications (n = 71), 49.3% stated that all their publications included full method descriptions and 53.5% expressed that ≥60% of their publications contained raw data. Overall, the results of the survey indicate that, albeit some misunderstandings about open research are still present, phytolith researchers are positive towards open research and intend to adopt its principles and practices.

Keywords

• open research
• open data
• fair data
• phytoliths
• archaeology
• palaeoecology