Julian Bogdani, Riccardo Montalbano, Paolo Rosati (eds), Archeo.FOSS XIV 2020: Open software, hardware, processes, data and formats in archeological research: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference (15-17 October 2020), Archaeopress Archaeology, Oxford 2021 | Book review

The paper is a book review of the volume Archeo.FOSS XIV 2020, edited by Julian Bogdani, Riccardo Montalbano and Paolo Rosati published by Archaeopress Archaeology in 2021. The volume collects the proceedings of the 14th international conference held on 15-17 October 2020 on the World Wide Web. Since 2006 the Archeo.FOSS annual convention has been an important moment of argumentation and updates regarding the most modern approaches and applications of free and opensource software solutions related to archaeology and more generally to the Cultural Heritage, establishing itself as a unique pioneering event. What stands out within this volume is undoubtedly the presence of an important space dedicated to open data and open standards solutions in archaeology and the ever increasing difficulties of all those scholars who strongly believe in the possibilities offered by this type of approach but who are still too few to consider it an urgent necessity of the entire academic community. Data sharing with reusable information in open platforms, published on the World Wide Web and distributed under open licences, is the main theme of the conference. The book strongly emphasises these needs, and it has been released in an open-access format using a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International Licence, in keeping with the spirit of the 14th Archaeo.FOSS conference, responding to the new stimuli of discussion, data access and information sharing needed by today’s scholars, researchers and beyond.