DARPA's Biology Is Technology conference discusses problems with open-source big data.

" ... Making scientific data open-source is a logical way to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers and democratize fields that are often stratified. It seems particularly exciting and promising when paired with big data—as computers have become powerful enough to process enormous data sets, the opportunity to make connections and draw conclusions seems irresistible. And large data repositories have been the foundation of major biomedical discoveries and achievements. Joel Dudley, a biomedical informatics researcher at Mount Sinai, talked at the conference about a counterintuitive molecular similarity between skin disease and Alzheimer's that was discovered only because of large-scale data mapping. He also showed how broad access to patient medical histories and genotypes can reveal things like subpopulations within Type 2 diabetes patients in which each group is predisposed to have different types of conditions alongside diabetes. The more data sets that are openly available, the more work like this can occur. But even something as potentially powerful as the open-source movement can be dead in the water if no one wants to engage with it ..."