Bioanthropological data sharing in Southern Patagonia, first steps on unknown path

D'ANGELO DEL CAMPO, MD

Denver

Congreso; 49th Annual North American Meeting of the Paleopathology Association; 2022

North American Paleopathology Association

The technical advancements that took place during the last decades have directly influenced the sciences, allowing for the utilization of new research tools that have consequently generated new knowledge. These new developments have improved the communications and access to information across the globe. In this new framework, data sharing arises as a global trend for the free access to data produced during research investigations. In recent years the first steps have been taken. First, some diagnostic studies those allow a better understanding about the available information about human skeletal remains in Southern Patagonia, where a deficient treatment of metadata or contextual information was observed. It is known that deficiencies in data and metadata communication lead to difficulties in replicability and verifiability, promoting redundancies, low efficiency and affecting the management of research funds, making the following steps more difficult. Moreover, once known the available information about human skeletal remains from the region, a pioneering database named Base de Información Bioantropologíca de Patagonia Austral (BIBPA) was developed, housing all the bioanthropological information published about the 1180 individual from Southern Patagonia. BIBPA is a public and open-source platform that is conceived as a tool that seeks to facilitate and streamline the work of the bioanthropological community. At that point, new questions arise: 1) maintenance and improvement of this type of platforms; 2) may this topic become central in our field? When, how, why, under what premises and conditions? 3) Is the bioanthropological community prepared for the changes that this approach entails? and finally 4) Which are the next steps?