3.6.1. Data alterations and financial sustainability
Some concerns about the limits of Open Data are about what may happen, or stop to happen, before 
they are published online. The most common concerns of this type are (from  Open Public Data:  
Then What? - Part 1): 
1. Opening up PSI causes those data to not be produced anymore, or to be only produced as  
private property by private corporations, because the public agencies whose job was to  
produce those data, can't sell them anymore. 
2. total  accessibility  of  data  provides  more  incentives  to  tinker  with  them,  at  the  risk  of 
reducing trust in institutions and inhibiting decision-making even more than today. 
Data manipulation is the topic of the next paragraph. Speaking of costs, a point to take into account  
is that, once data are open, routinely used and monitored by as many independent users as possible,  
even  the  cost  of  keeping  them  up  to  date  may  be  sensibly  reduced:  in  other  words,  in  the 
medium/long term Open Data may reduce the need to periodically perform complete, that is very  
expensive, studies and surveys to update a whole corpus of data in one run. 
Besides, and above all, even if opening data always destroyed any source of income for the public  
office that used to create and maintain them, this problem would only exist for the PSI datasets that  
are  already sold today. Such data, even if of strategic importance  as is the  case  with digital  
cartography, are only a minimal fraction of all the PSI that could and should be opened to increase  
transparency, reduce the costs of Government and stimulate the economy. In all these other cases: 
• the  money  to  generate  the  data  already  arrives  by  some  other  source  than  sales  and 
licensing(but even with those data it may be possible to generate them by crowdsourcing,  
thereby reducing those costs!) 
• the only extra expense caused by publishing those data online (assuming they're already  
available in some digital format, of course!), would be the hosting and bandwidth costs, that  
may be greatly reduced by mirroring and other technical solutions like torrents, already  
widely used to distribute Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) through the Internet. 
3.6.2. Real impact of data manipulation or misunderstanding
The fix for the risk that data is manipulated is to not only open government data and procedures, but 
to simplify the latter (which eventually also greatly reduces cost) as much as possible. Abundance  
of occasions to secretly play with data and how they are managed is a symptom of excessive, or  
peak  complexity:  again,  problems  and  risks  with  Open  Data  are  a  symptom  of  a  [pre-
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Copyright  2011 LEM, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. This work is released under a Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)