When focusing on open government data (OGD) publishing and related barriers, there are several complexities present. Largely, current research is focused on publishing and usage of OGD; and we argue that there are a need to investigate and to systematise OGD barrier research in order to understand and outline an expanded scope of the phenomenon. We expand by clarifying barriers linked to the release decision and the data’s organisational context. To investigate the OGD barriers, we conduct a systematic literature review, identifying 34 articles as a point of departure for our analysis. From these articles we create, present and discuss illustrations on historical development, barrier types, and different research focuses on OGD. When analysing the articles, we identify a focus on technical, organisational, and legal barrier types, while studies on open data usage and systems are less frequent. Our analysis also identifies some possible open data research barriers. In the article we also relate barriers to an expanded OGD process (Suitability, Release, Publish, Use, and Evaluation), identifying 46 barriers with possible linkages. The results is an expanded scope and a conceptual illustration of OGD barriers.