Recent work points to the pivotal role of institutions in influencing open science practice in their constituencies (Fecher et al., 2015; LERU Research Data Working Group, 2013; Huang et al., 2012). In this context, the MNI is an interesting case study because it is the first organization to introduce an institution-wide open-science platform (Rouleau, 2017) and because certain characteristics of biomedical research (it is highly competitive, it involves human subjects and the commercial returns can be very high) make it a challenging field for openness (Tenopir et al., 2011; Haeussler, 2011; Walsh et al., 2007). Our study underlines several relevant points.