Purpose This paper seeks to discuss the question of openness in eScience. Designmethodologyapproach The study is based on 12 indepth interviews with principal investigators, project managers and developers involved in UK eScience projects, together with supporting documentary evidence from project web sites. The approach was to explore the juxtaposition of research governance at the institutional level and local research practices at the project level. Interview questions focused on research inputs, software development processes, access to resources, project documentation, dissemination of outputs and byproducts, licensing issues, and institutional contracts. Findings The findings suggest that, although there is a widely shared ethos of openness in everyday research practice, there are many uncertainties and yettobe resolved issues, despite strong policy imperatives towards openly shared resources. Research limitationsimplications The paper concludes by observing a stratification of openness in practice and the need for more nuanced understanding of openness at the level of policy making. This research was based on interviews within a limited number of eScienceSocial Science projects and the intention is to address this in future work by scaling the study up to a survey that will reach the entire UK eScienceSocial Science community. Practical implications The fundamental challenge in resolving openness in practice and policy, and thereby moving towards a sustainable infrastructure for eScience, is the coordination and integration of goals across eScience efforts, rather than one of resolving IPR Intellectual Property Rights issues, which has been the central focus of openness debates thus far. Originalityvalue The question of openness has previously been posed on the macrolevel of research policy, e.g. whether science as a whole can be characterized as open science, or in relation to the dissemination of published outputs, e.g. Open Access. Instead, a finegrained perspective is taken focusing on individual research projects and the various facets of openness in practice.

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