PalaeOpen Workshop “Developing Data Sharing in Archaeozoology” at the SNSB

From June 22 to 23, 2026, members of the PalaeOpen initiative met in Munich at the SNSB. Archaeozoologists and paleoecologists from Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the Czech Republic engaged in intensive discussions on the topic “Developing data sharing in Archaeozoology.”

PalaeOpen is a COST Action (= European Cooperation in Science and Technology)—an EU-funded initiative aimed at connecting researchers who generate and analyze paleoecological data as part of their projects. This includes metadata from a wide range of disciplines. Much of this paleoecological data is currently scattered across various repositories and databases and is mostly not publicly accessible. To date, there are only a few platforms that bring this multidisciplinary data together. Only by linking these discipline-specific repositories can the data be utilized for paleoecological meta-analyses.

At the workshop “Developing Data Sharing in Archaeozoology” in Munich, various platforms for data exchange (e.g., Neotoma, SEAD, or BIAD) as well as for recording raw data (e.g., OssoBook) were presented and evaluated—particularly with regard to their use by a multidisciplinary research community. In particular, the OssoBook software—developed at the SNSB and LMU Munich for storing and analyzing osteological data—is well-suited for such further development.