Defining and advocating Open Data in archaeology

A piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike" (http://opendefinition.org/). Driven by demands for greater transparency from government, general freedom of information and an increased awareness of the unanticipated re-use values of existing information, Open Data has seen dramatic growth in the past two years. Is archaeology part of this general trend? Our aim is to explore what it means to make archaeological data open and what processes are required to make it happen in a satisfactory way. There are three major goals: (a) individual and institutional advocacy, (b) ethical discussion and consensus- building, and (c) knowledge transfer (licenses guidance, wider academic context, repositories etc.). In this paper, we explore some of these issues in greater detail.