Recommended Reading: John Hawks On 3D Fossil Printing

From his "weblog" anthropologist John Hawks reproduces an interview he gave on the subject of the Homo Naledi discovery team's publishing of 3D printing specifications for the public use.

How 3D printing fossils will change the way we look at human evolution

The Vice Chancellor of Wits University, Adam Habib, spoke at the announcement of Homo naledi last month, and he really said something that I think resonates widely:

We often talk about science as having no boundaries, but in our world scientific knowledge has become commodified, and too often, what should be the bequest of the world, the bequest of a common humanity, is locked up under paywalls that postgraduate students and researchers cannot get access to. So what we did when we made this discovery, was we put cameras in the cave, and we streamed it live from day one.

"We partnered with eLIFE, an open access journal, to make sure that the discovery was available to all of humanity. And what we did in that practice, is create the first elements of a common global academy….We are not simply going to be beneficiaries of open access, but we are going to be contributors to open access, to the knowledge of a common humanity."

I’ve been sharing that quote a lot, because it expresses something really central. South Africa is stepping forward to lead in the area of open access, and this is not just one team of scientists, we have tremendous support from every level of the scientific enterprise and government. Our team has gotten a lot of attention for this because people aren’t used to seeing significant new discoveries published in such an open access way. But this is the future.
Paleoanthropology is about uncovering the history that all humans share. People are curious about it, they want to encounter that history, they want to explore their origins. As scientists we have the tremendous privilege of discovery, and it gives us a responsibility to enable people to understand our common past.