Opening Research on the Ancient Near East

Already in the ANEE research proposal, open science was chosen to be one of the key priorities of the centre. A concrete measure to support good practices in open science was the setting up of an open science workgroup that has been active through the entire lifespan of the project.

The workgroup has supported the centre and its researchers in three ways. First, it has raised awareness about the benefits of open science and educated researchers in its best practices. The workgroup has organized events in collaboration with the university library and provided the members of the centre with guidelines and concrete instructions on opening their research results and data.

Second, the workgroup has maintained a list of major journals in the fields of ancient Near Eastern studies and archaeology, providing information about the open access options in each journal. This has helped researchers to find publishing venues that support open access and learn about the open access policies of each journal. Unfortunately, such information is still difficult to find on journal websites. The workgroup has also monitored the number of open access publications in ANEE and encouraged researchers to self-archive their articles whenever allowed by the publisher.

Third, the open science workgroup has paid attention to the openness and permanent availability of the research data and tools developed by ANEE researchers. It is a common problem that creation and publication of research data is not considered a merit in recruitment and research funding processes in the humanities. To make the value of data production more visible, ANEE has promoted the practice of citing datasets in research publications similarly to how books and articles are cited. The open science workgroup has curated , aiming to collect ANEE research datasets in one place. ANEE has also encouraged its researchers to describe their datasets in peer-reviewed articles in dedicated data journals such as the .

ANEE has been quite successful in making its research outputs openly available. Out of its peer-reviewed publications, 78% of journal articles, 69% of book chapters, 98% of articles in conference proceedings, and 34% of monographs and edited books are openly available. Percentages are reasonably high for articles and book chapters, but quite low for books. This is explained by the current open access policies and available funding. Researchers are typically allowed to self-archive their articles, and there is funding available to pay article processing charges. At the same time, self-archiving books is not usually allowed, and their open access charges are very high. All ANEE publications can be explored and open access publications downloaded on .

Open science is not only for the academic community, but the public also has the right to access and use the knowledge produced with taxpayers’ money. ANEE has targeted its efforts of dissemination and education to two primary audiences. The first group has been people living in Finland, especially because there is relatively little information about the ancient Near East available in the Finnish language. ANEE has organized in Helsinki and Jyväskylä, written , and created . Second, ANEE carried out archaeological fieldwork in Jordan together with Yarmouk University, and much effort was invested in engaging with local communities and disseminating information about the ongoing work to them. 

Future Centres of Excellence and other large research projects in the humanities could also benefit from a dedicated task group for open science. By educating researchers and providing them with hands-on support, the quantity of open research data and publications can be quite easily increased.