Openness of communication in science has a number of crucial functions: in conjunction with organized scepticism (peer review) the distribution of attention and, thus, by implication of reputation which becomes the basis of science's social structure. It also serves as indicator of quality to the outside (i.e. society) and is the basis of resource allocation. Ideally, any interference with this mechanism would be suboptimal. However, various conditions compromise openness: most fundamentally the internal competition for priority, but also economic interests and political strategies to instrumentalize scientific knowledge and to profit from it. In the talk these compromizing conditions will be discussed.