Hey, I'm Zack. I'm a scholar of scientific practice at McGill University.

My work investigates how scientists contribute to and govern collectively-maintained information commons, and the technical and administrative infrastructures that scaffold these efforts. I'm especially interested in data sharing, open source communities of practice, and the cultural and epistemic implications of open science infrastructures and policy. I focus on archaeology, the social sciences, and heritage-oriented humanities disciplines, as well as epidemiology and population health domains.

Here are some of the cool things I'm working on:

• CITF-Postdoc: The goal of my postdoc is to articulate the social and collaborative ties that scaffold the Covid-19 Immunity Task Force (CITF) -- an initiative whose mandate was to catalyze, support, fund and harmonize knowledge on SARS-CoV-2 immunity across Canada. The CITF Databank provides continued support by centralizing research data provided by CITF-funded studies and by making the data accessible for extended use.
  • CITF-emails: Part of this project investigates the invisible labour of research data sharing through analysis of operational email correspondence.
  • RDS-Review: I've also initiated work on a scoping review mapping the factors reported to influence the sharing and reuse of research data, including barriers, facilitators, and governance mechanisms. It centres on health research data and compares it with research data sharing in other fields.
• open-archaeo: A comprehensive list of open source software created by and for archaeologists.
• diamond.open-archaeo: A community-maintained list of diamond open access journals in archaeology, to help showcase and encourage broader support for these initiatives.
• BibVik: This project identifies trends in the published archaeological literature concerning the origins of the Viking Age, including associations between various topics, methods and sources of evidence, and how these modes of inquiry are related to researchers' personal or professional identities and relationships.

Check out my CV for a list of my published work and details on my current and past projects. I also sometimes post on my blog.

I can be reached on Mastodon at archaeo.social/@zackbatist.