[srconstantin]

Secret I believe to be true:

A good deal of experimental research is a cartel on resources and data. The "open access" movement in biology is not what programmers would think of as open; you can get access to many "open" data sets only by application, and you pretty much need to be an academic biologist to be granted an application. Science would be much stronger if there was a norm of truly sharing data. But restricting access is in the interest of each individual researcher who wants to maintain his/her relative prestige advantage.