Barriers to open science and how to lower them | Opensource.com

"When it comes to opening up your work there is, ironically, a bit of a secret. Here it is: being open—in open science, open source software, or any other open community—can be hard. Sometimes it can be harder than being closed. In an effort to attract more people to the cause, advocates of openness tend to tout its benefits.  Said benefits are bountiful: increased collaboration and dissemination of ideas, transparency leading to more frequent error checking, improved reproducibility, easier meta-analysis, and greater diversity in participation, just to name a few. But there are downsides, too. One of those is that it can be difficult to do your research openly. (Note here that I mean well and openly. Taking the full contents of your hard drive and dumping it on a server somewhere might be technically open, but it’s not much use to anyone.) How is it hard to open up your work? And why? ..."