A political perspective on the power of data reuse

Discussions of archaeological data reuse usually focus on technical and methodological questions: formats, metadata, ontologies and workflows. This contribution addresses a dimension that is rarely made explicit, namely the politics of decision-making that surrounds research data. Who defines the rules for storing and accessing data, who decides what counts as valuable data, and who ultimately determines what will survive in the digital record? Written from the perspective of a national research data infrastructure for the humanities, the paper argues that current funder policies, which typically require deposition in a FAIR repository and accessibility for at least ten years, postpone rather than resolve a growing tension between the wish to preserve as much as possible and the financial, technical and ecological costs of long-term digital preservation. When decisions about appraisal become unavoidable, there is a real risk that they will be based on simple, convenient metrics such as registered users, downloads or citations, which say little about the value of open, linked archaeological data. The paper further argues that the common assumption that data become obsolete after a short period does not hold for much archaeological documentation, which is irreproducible, and that the actual reuse of archaeological datasets remains limited, not least because many archived datasets are difficult to reuse. Standardisation is discussed as both a precondition for reuse and a perceived constraint on research. Four principles are proposed for discussion: discipline-sensitive evaluation, transparent criteria, better infrastructure for reuse, and community responsibility. Promoting reuse, it is concluded, is not only a methodological matter but also a strategy for the long-term preservation of archaeological data.