Jean-Jacques Hublin, the director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, recently commented in the journal Nature on the need to provide free (or at least affordable) access to digital data for paleoanthropologists. Hublin discusses microCT data of hominin fossils in particular, and the Leipzig team just recently released quite a bit of free digital material for the hominin fossils from Kromdraai, South Africa (Skinner et al., 2013).
The question of access has always been a thorny one in paleoanthropology: on the one hand you have the research teams that spend months (even years) recovering the fossils and the museums whose responsibility it is to protect their country's heritage, and, on the other, researchers and educators who would like access to the materials to carry out additional research and teaching. I think open access to data is a good idea in principle, now its just a matter of convincing researchers and museums to open up! Easier said than done. Once you publish a study, the data are, after all, available, but many researchers are hesitant to publish their raw data because they may still want to carry out additional analyses before anyone else (and why not?). In other cases, its simply a matter of data management capabilities and expertise rather than any stinginess.
References:
Hublin, J-J (2013). Free digital scans of human fossils. Nature 497, 183.
Skinner, MM, Kivell, TL, Potze, S, Hublin, J-J (2013). Microtomographic archive of fossil hominin specimens from Kromdraai B, South Africa. Journal of Human Evolution 64, 434-447.
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