Exemplary new paper in QSR that embodies open science principles

[Ben Marwick]

Hi everyone,

The mission of the Open Science Interest Group is to advance openness in archaeological research, share information on how to develop open practices, and advocate open and reproducible archaeological research. 

I want to highlight a new paper by Michael Barton and colleagues because it is a shining example of all three of these areas: http://cmbarton.wdfiles.com/local--files/publications/Barton%20et%20al.%20-%202017%20-%20Risk%20and%20resilience%20in%20the%20late%20glacial%20a%20case%20st.pdf (or https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2017.09.015).

This paper is exemplary because they report a substantial archaeological analysis of LGM foragers in the Mediterranean, and support analysis with a GitHub repository containing data files and R Markdown documents that show the R code to generate the figures and other results presented in the paper.

The effort the authors have put into to openness and transparency is truly impressive, and their compendium is worthy of careful study. If this Interest Group had an award, this paper would be a strong contender! Much of archaeological research is highly amenable to taking this approach to openness (though maybe not you people who need 1000s of compute hours on a cluster to get a result).

When you come across similar papers, please do share the URL with the OSIG group so we can recognize these efforts to make archaeological research more transparent and open, and learn from studying published examples.  I am also trying to keep a list at https://github.com/benmarwick/ctv-archaeology but it is not exhaustive (sorry if I've missed your paper, pull requests welcome!)

best,

Ben