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.

An online survey was developed to query researchers on their attitudes and practices with data archiving and sharing across biological anthropology and related fields. The survey was administered through Qualtrics and was open from May 23 – July 18, 2021. The link to the survey was sent via listserv and/or posted on the website of 19 professional societies and informal groups interested in data sharing. Responses from 722 participants were received and the full Qualtrics survey report is available at https://ql.tc/4reI82. The raw data as exported from Qualtrics (Excel file) and the full survey (Word file) are deposited in this submission.