The opportunity cost of my #OpenScience was 35 hours + $690

"Several years ago I made a personal commitment to Open Science: I try to publish papers on which I am the lead author on in open access journals and I archive data for these papers in Dryad, Figshare and other repositories. Recently I started posting preprints of my manuscripts as well, and I encourage authors submitting to the journal of which I am Editor to do the same.  The thing that I had been most hesitant about was posting my code – I’ve been programming for a long time, but I’m not the most elegant of programmers (NB: massive understatement), so to be honest I was a little worried people would mock my efforts. I finally got over that, stumbled through some GitHub tutorials, and as a result you can now go over there to see the code used to do the analyses and generate figures for my two most recent articles, as well as for a few projects in progress.   Although I feel good about having done this, it’s also become clear to me that there is a real opportunity cost to Open Science about which I think we need to be honest with our students.  It’s not the possibility of getting scooped because we post our data – I hear that concern a lot but concrete examples seem hard to come by.  It’s also not the fact that our profession still prioritizes articles in publications like Science, Nature, or PNAS, so as a candidate on the job market you are still way ahead of the pack if your paper is in one of those journals than if it is in PeerJ or PLoS ONE (I’m not saying that’s right, only that it’s currently true).  No, those are costs to Open Science, but I’m taking here about the  Opportunity Cost: the time I devoted to archiving data and code could have been spent on other activities that have greater rewards under the current system. I could have also used the money I spent on archiving fees and publishing in a journal with an OA option to advance ongoing research in the lab. For my most recent paper I did the math ..."