Now that I’ve had some time to process thenew White House public access policy, here’s a few thoughts.

First and foremost, I think the policy is worth celebrating. This is something on which there is a difference of opinion. Mike Eisen is the most vocal and eloquent critic of the policy, and his post on the topic is essential reading whether you like his position or not.

I disagree with Mike on the conclusion, but it’s worth examining why. And it’s not worth attacking him - indeed, attacking each other is a feature of the OA movement that sickens me.

But I think his position comes more from a worldview where there is indeed real movement towards true OA (i.e., no embargo, open copyright licenses, and a total change of the publication industry via startups both non profit and for profit). Compared to that progress, the policy is like going back in time to when the NIH had no policy.

But here’s the thing. That progress simply doesn’t exist in most of the other spaces where the US Government invests in research. It doesn’t exist in agriculture (100,000 papers per year which will be key to food supply and debunking bullshit claims about GMO food, for example), or defense, or trade, or patents, or space science, or energy.

I wrote a paper with my dad on open access and energy policy (my dad is a climate change adaption scientist with a piece of the IPCC Nobel Prize) that opened my eyes to just how little of the energy literature is OA. If you look at the links in an IPCC report you’ll be shocked at how few you can read. None of the green, or gold, OA conversation has had a significant impact there at all.

Compared to the world that exists there, a world that is not being wrenched open by change and entrepreneurs and repositories, this policy is indeed enormous progress.

I don’t like the embargo entrenchment at 12 months. I don’t like the lack of reuse rights. I don’t like allowing linking into journal archives as opposed to centralized repositories. I don’t like the praise of the dying traditional publishing industry, but that’s pablum.

So let’s be frank. This isn’t a strong open access policy. But that’s ok by me.

Because it’s an enormous expansion of public access into spheres of research where it was essentially absent from the conversation. It creates a policy environment that tilts the field towards change, towards startups, towards publishers whose embrace to real Open Access becomes a competitive advantage over time - and it does so across an enormous swath of science.

It re-creates the conditions built in the life sciences years ago in other sciences. I believe that’s what will advance open access fastest there. But let’s also not attack Mike, or others, who disagree. We need to be constantly reminded to strive for the most, and attacking one’s own critics is not a healthy sign of an open movement.

This policy is not the end of our work in open access, or even the beginning of the end. But I do believe it’s at last the end of the beginning of the enormous change from closed publication of science to open publication of science. From now on it’s about how we implement access, not if.

Hats off to everyone, and now get back to work, because we’re a long way from done. Time to focus our energy on Congress to finish the job.