This study examines how practices of open science, a movement for making scholarship more open, shareable, and reusable, are learned and performed by individual scholars across different fields, in both the sciences and humanities. New open practices are being developed in response to technologies that allow for researchers to easily share their scholarship and collaborate with others. Without established procedures for implementing open scholarship, many academics are faced with building their own communities for openness, while also learning how to assimilate openness into their current workflows for teaching and research. Based on the challenges this presents, this dissertation is guided by the question: how do academics learn and do openness?To answer this question, I engaged in participant observation at a local training event, the Open Incubator, which was a five-week workshop for developing open projects hosted by a university library. Following the workshop, I conducted qualitative surveys and document-based interviews with attendees and facilitators of the workshop. In these interviews, I asked participants about their experiences learning and practicing openness within their own disciplines. Using activity theory as a framework for analysis, I found that the Open Incubator, as a non-discipline specific learning initiative, functions well because it enables participants to question their current activity systems through exposure to other disciplines and norms. For this to work, this type of training requires facilitators who can act as boundary spanners between faculty members, university initiatives, and the open science movement.Additionally, I found that individuals pursuing openness face contradictions with traditional systems of teaching and research or neighboring systems that have not yet adapted to openness. These contradictions are barriers to open practice because participants felt vulnerable or discouraged from pursuing openness in some instances. However, contradictions also allowed participants to envision alternative ways of acting and new systems where openness can work in conjunction with academic practices. Agendas and policies that are specific to individuals' disciplines may help to bring about more open systems for academics.Finally, I found that individuals learn by internalizing and externalizing information from diverse sources, including courses, mentors, peers, and conceptual models from other disciplines and media. Individuals adapted these sources through remixing, repurposing, and adapting to create new, open work within their disciplinary communities. With this, learning is a process where individuals learn while also contributing to and shaping their communities of practice.These results mean that learning and doing openness occur through exposure to systems, norms, and concepts from both inside and outside of the discipline. Further, through my research I find that openness operates differently for different individuals. Therefore, there is no one way to learn openness, rather there are different ways to foster openness. These include encountering different people, disciplines, technologies, and media associated with openness; engaging with boundary spanners who can facilitate open interventions; and creating documentation to support open work, such as policies, agendas, and infrastructure that acknowledge the importance of openness and also protect those who pursue it. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]