User:Nehemie.strupler/sandbox/Open Context

What is it?
Open Context is web based open-access publishing service that invests in both data quality and linking to a broarder world of scientific information. To access their own webpage click here.

When and who founded it
It was founded in 2006 and is maintained and administered by the Alexandria Archive Institute, a non-profit organization, located in San Francisco and is managed by the people stated on the webpage of their team. Its current editors-in-chief are Sarah Whitcher Kansa and Eric Kansa.

Location
San Francisco, United States of America

How the name was chosen
The first word Open stands for the open access, open source and open data. The second word Context stands for linking a large amount of data together to help understand contexts.

Logo
to be uploaded soon

History
contents from Publishing Data Online through Open Context: Eric Kansa

What are the aims?
Open Context is a data publisher. Its aim is to make archaeological data truly accessible, reusable, and co-operable on different systems or platforms, between various research disciplines in a wider community The challenges and weaknesses? Therefore it is both an opportunity and challenge to really take an Ethical framing into account in practice under the 2 main guiding principles of FAIR Data and CARE principles.

The challenges
Archaeology is a discipline within a complex social context that for example involves colonialism, historical power asymmetries, entrenched biases, etc., and whether the accessible, co-operable and reusable platform can offer equal opportunities for diversified engagement and participation, which represent the ethical challenges. Archaeology is also a discipline that straddles natural sciences and humanities, which also refers to various scales from as big as the globe to as small as the material sample. In the Semantic aspect, there are few consensuses between different disciplines. There are of course technical issues such as the complexity and variability in the scale of data, media, and the spectrum of structured data to be integrated and organized. The scarcity of not only financial recourses but also of multi-skills and experience with data, reproducible research practices, and data professionalism raises the actual capacity challenge.

How is it evolving?
The open context was launched in 2006 and it is still a project in progress. The more data is absorbed and the longer the platform runs, the better the open context achieves an understanding of the needs around the data. Recently, Open Context is processing a major software revision and re-architecture work. The project will continue refurbishing and improving. Which organization supports it? The Open Context has been supported by various institutions and infrastructures around the globe. The California Digital Library as the main institutional repository preserves the published data and keeps persistent IDs. The German Archaeological Institute (DAI) as a collaborative institution maintains a mirror site. The Internet Archive and Zonota stored some amount of media resources.

Which prices?
Open Context won the Digital Curation Award in 2014. In 2016, the Archaeological Institute of America granted an award for the contributions in digital archaeology to Open Context. The work on promoting science has also been recognized by the White House in 2013.