John Wilbanks over at Science Commons picked up an interesting story reported in the Wall Street Journal. A recent poll of US citizens show an amazing 80% in favor of”open access to federally funded research! (link)

Clearly scholarly societies in general, and archaeologists in particular should not ignore this kind of evidence. Archaeology, along with other disciplines, is facing the threat of exile from the NSF.” Senator Kay Bailey (R- Texas) is attacking NSF support of the social sciences (more here and here).

Our field either directly or indirectly depends on public support. It seems archaeologists need to better communicate the value and relevance of their work. Can Open Access help in this regard?

It’s probably part of the answer. Another aspect is encouraging more clear and effective communication with the public (but that will have to be the subject of another posting). There’s mounting evidence that open access increases the impact of research (see a recent study in PLoS Biology). This is the crucial measure of journal success (not to mention personal career advancement). More open access archaeology would probably lead to more use of archaeology in multidisciplinary research programs. In other words, we’ll become more relevant to other disciplines, and that would help us make our case in the political arena.

This should point should be remembered when we look to build repositories for our primary data. These repositories should serve more than the archaeological community. Other researchers and the general public can find value in archaeological data repositories, if allowed (of course with proper protections for sensitive data), and if we think about issues of ease of use.

In the end, we need to make a case for archaeology both to our colleagues in other disciplines and to the general public. Letting the public know what our field is about in a rich and meaningful way makes political and ethical sense.