Academics in some fields build up entire careers worth of work that all builds upon their "special sauce" super-secret dataset or software, which they've built

Academics in some fields build up entire careers worth of work that all builds upon their "special sauce" super-secret dataset or software, which they've built up over many years, and while there might be enough information in principle in their papers to reproduce the data or results, it would be a thesis level project to actually do so. There's a story (unfortunately I forget where, perhaps someone else can jog my memory?) about a string theory PhD student who, after getting annoyed wasting months on a set of hundreds of straightforward but tedious and time consuming calculations, decided to just do it all once and for all and spend the time to put together a table of results for all of them. Of course, this helped his future work immensely. When he went to his PhD advisor to ask what he thought about publishing that table, the guy looked at him like he was crazy. Again, I don't remember the quote, but it was along the lines of "What you have there will give you a 1000% speed advantage pushing out papers in this field compared to your peers - you'd have to be crazy to share that sort of competitive advantage with everyone else when you could keep it to yourself, this is your golden ticket!" There is also the issue of preventing competitor (other researchers here) to get a free ride on your work - getting data, preparing them is a huge part of the researcher's work in some fields. Which brings to light very clearly the source of the problem - the ideal of academia is to advance the overall state of knowledge as fast as possible, but once you start using the word "competitor" in a serious way that actually has bearing on whether you publish something useful or not, that ideal has been perverted. Obviously it's the "publish or perish" mindset that causes this, and I absolutely understand why people would be tempted to see their supposed colleagues as competitors instead of collaborators (in the general sense, when they're not actively collaborating on a paper); it's one of the main reasons I decided not to go into academia, in fact, I saw too much political bullshit spewing about even in the harder fields like physics and math. I have no idea how to solve any of this, but it's a serious breakdown in the system, and I suspect it (publish-or-perish, not just information hiding) hinders the long term progression of academic knowledge in some of these fields by a large amount, not in the least because it rewards herd-like behavior and punishes exploration. That's another can of worms for another day, though...