"We have met the enemy, and he is us": Professional, social, and financial costs of sharing data

In the early 1990s, ecologists asserted the value of unrestricted sharing of data and incentivized their documentation, archiving, and distribution. Twenty-five years on, we know that open data increases impacts of papers and spurs synthesis, and technical barriers to data sharing have largely disappeared. But social barriers still limit attainment of a truly "open ecology." These barriers include: fears of being "scooped;" concerns for resources required to organize data; a lack of a widely-accepted system for citing them and crediting their authors; and inequities in their distribution and use. In short, the enemy of open data is us.