Why Open Data is Awesome – A Completely Self-Interested Explanation | My Scholarly Goop

"The expectation of openness makes you label your variables more sensibly. It makes you keep track of your composite variables more thoroughly. It makes you save your data to some repository more permanently accessible than whatever laptop you happened to have been given by your department. All of these things mean that when that request to share your data arrives – whether directly or through a call for data – you will avoid the sinking feeling of “where… what name… ugh”, and instead experience the warm glow of “yes! I can contribute!” – which, believe me, is much much better."