This Blog post is in gratitude to the visionary Jean Claude Bradley

Why do I do Open?

I do Open because I care about science belonging to everyone. I'm and academic and I think the emphasis that Open is to benefit academics (more citations, greater visibility, etc.) misses the main point, which is that we are funded by the world to do science that the world directly benefits from.
There have been three great open initiatives in the last century that I have followed:
All of these have massively influenced my approach to Open and act as the ideal for collaborative communal action. I have contributed Open Source over 20 years and have both benefitted and benefitted others. It's a gift economy that works well, that companies have signed up to and that funders support. If any of these three had been closed the world would have been immeasurably poorer, often leading to control by commercial organisations 
The benefits are many - the main ones are:

 Open Access today

I had hoped that "Open Access" as visioned in the BOAI would parallel Open Code and Open Bioscience. In practice, for me, current Open Access has not delivered its promise and is not likely to in the next decade - there is too much fragmentation, open-washing, timidity, and restrictive practices. 15 years after BOAI I cannot go to a single point -of-contact and ask to download all Open Access papers (which is what I wish to do).
can download some subsets - most notably EuropePMC - and my non-profit organization Contentmine.org does this every day. We've worked with Wikimedia (Wikidata) to create WikiFactmine which aims to index all publica science against Wikidata (a collection of nearly 40 million facts). 15% of Wikidata is now the WikifactMine list of Open Access papers. A partial success for Open Access, making the science effectively available to the whole world, not just academics.
But vast swathes of chemistry, materials, engineering are effectively closed. So yes, WikiFactMine is a partial success for Open Access and is only 

Open Notebook Science

F/OSS Software is developed in public view - warts and all. Why not science thought one visionary chemist, Jean Claude Bradley, whom I knew well and collaborated with. J-C's vision was that scientists should do all their work in public view and post their results as soon as they got them. His motto "No insider knowledge" requires that any reader should know as much about the experiment as as the scientists who did this. It is Open by design .
J-C developed this with young chemists, often undergraduates, measuring solubilities and publishing them immediately. The Open approach has an immediate effect on quality. People are often happy to expose their work, but they are not happy to expose palpably sloppy science. I contend that
Open Notebook Science mean Better Science
and this is the primary benefit. I've been through this myself and I feel the pressure always to be better, more organized, more thorough - to show work I am proud of.
This doesn't mean that you have to get it right first time. For 30 years F/OSS has accepted that buggy code is fine and that it will be gradually improved. Similarly for science - experiments often go wrong and need repeating, and we should glory in this, not pretend that it's private until it's "publishable". There are an increasing number of Open Notebook practitioners and I'll just highlight one - Mat Todd and colleagues in Sydney who run Open Source Malaria. :
Guided by open source principles, everything is open and anyone can contribute.
Here's today's experiment and note that the data is all on Github.

My own OpenNotebookScience

I've tried to practice what I preach. Here are two examples where everything appeared in public as soon as it was created.