Starting to close the skills gap through Open Science Skills Workshops | Software Sustainability Institute

"There are still many academic disciplines that are on the periphery of activities related to open and sustainable research. Archaeology is making some steps in this direction but there is still a long way to go.

Archaeology sits at the intersection of the humanities and sciences and as a result open science practices are being adopted at different rates throughout the discipline. Certain sub-disciplines that have always used more computational tools in their research are implementing open ways of working more quickly due to their skills being complementary to this new way of working. 

This sporadic implementation of open working is resulting in large gaps in skills for certain sub-disciplines of Archaeology. It is rare for computational skills to be taught as part of Archaeology degrees. The teaching of these skills is very dependent on the lecturer's own interests, or the universities own adoption of open science. This means that these skills are not being taught routinely to archaeology students, so that they receive a grounding in open science practices and related computing skills.  

To see the acceleration of sustainable research practices in our discipline, we need to fill in these skill gaps so that there is a much more coherent approach in our research. Archaeological investigations often consist of large teams with many different specialists and therefore it is currently difficult to implement open ways of working in these large projects due to a lack of skills. If we are to really gain from open research, we need to make sure that all members of our team have the knowledge of how to conduct open science projects, and also the related computational skills, so we are all heading in the same open and sustainable research direction. ..."