The FdA’s policy on Open Science is “Open when applicable”. The Faculty of Archaeology adheres to Leiden University Open Access Policy. This means you are required to publish your data in Open Access when possible. But why say: as open as possible, as restricted as necessary? It is because some data must be restricted due to privacy reasons, copyrights, or database rights.

Graduating Ph.D. researchers need to submit their approved dissertation to the open-access Leiden University Scholarly Repository, after a plagiarism check. Additionally, they have to deposit their research data in a trusted repository, and if needed, it is possible to temporarily put it under an embargo.

When thinking about your research, please double-check if there are costs involved in depositing your research data Open Access on one of the online data repositories. The costs may increase depending on the size of the data files and on the data repository of your choice. We highly recommend depositing in DANS Data Station since it is cost-free up to 50 GB of data. The cost of depositing larger datasets is not fixed and depends on multiple factors.

Data that cannot be deposited (for intellectual property reasons, privacy reasons, research not being finalized etc.), but that needs preservation, has to be submitted to the faculty “data vault”. You do this by submitting the data to the Data Steward, who will save it in the data vault. This is a directory in the university network that is only accessible to the Data Manager. This is meant to make the evaluation of your results possible in case of doubt or another outcome for which more data is needed than the subset you selected for archiving.

At the Faculty of Archaeology, we maintain the following retention periods:

• Indefinite for the published dataset
• 5 years for non-personal and pseudonymized data
• 6 months after the research for identifying information
• 10 years for the data management plan.