Interview with Matthew Todd, The University of Sydney, Australia, recorded at the BEILSTEIN OPEN SCIENCE SYMPOSIUM (22 – 24 May 2017). Matt’s view of open science in chemistry is to share everything that you are doing as you are doing it allowing others to reuse your data in their own work. At the moment there are not that many scientists being completely open. Currently, when publishing articles in journals we mainly publish positive results, plus we keep things secret due to protecting potential IP. This inhibits free-flow of data and knowledge. The best order of events would be to publish data and then publish an article as a summary of the project. This allows other people to get better insights and the scientific record will be more complete. It is also important to share what we don’t know. The Open Source Malaria project is a good example of this. Other scientists spot issues that need to dealt with, or suggest other compounds that can be made, provide new insights and generally speed up and improve the project. There is resistance to being open in case you miss some important insight that would then be made by others. In academia it is still important to been seen as owning something, but this inhibits science. Matt believes that we have gone too far with protection of IP and the expectations of what IP research projects would be able to generate.