A review of “Open” in spatial epidemiology over the past thirty years. Nearly thirty years ago I quit my Physics PhD and began to drag GIS, statistics and epidemiology kicking and screaming together, which I’ve been doing ever since. From a world with no WWW, no Linux, and no Open Source, we’ve come to a place where politically-motivated groups attack disease modellers on github over code used to inform government COVID-19 pandemic policy. The talk will introduce some ideas in spatial statistics, epidemiology, and disease surveillance. It will show how the landscape has changed and how Open Source and Open Data are now influencing the debate around disease surveillance in the COVID-19 era. I’ll outline how new technologies for reproducible research can bring about more openness and accountability for disease outbreak epidemiology.