It’s been a heady day for “open access”.\u00a0A petition<\/a> urging the Obama administration to extend the NIH’s public access policy to other government agencies blew past the halfway point in its goal to gather 25,000 signatures. And the faculty senate at UCSF voted to approve an “open access” policy<\/a> that would “require” its faculty to make all of their papers freely available.<\/p>\n Both of these are important steps in the long-running push for open access.\u00a0But amidst the giddy triumphalism surrounding these events on blogs and twitter, an important point is being ignored: neither of these are really “open access” policies, and treating them as if they are trivializes their shortcomings in critical areas and risks people declaring premature victory when there is no much more left to be done.<\/p>\n I’ll start with the White House petition. I love that this is happening, and that it is gathering signatures rapidly. But the best outcome we can hope for is what the petition calls for – implementation of public access policies like the NIH’s at other federal agencies. This would obviously be a good thing. And having the administration come out in favor of public access establishes an important principle – that the public has a stake in how the results of the research it funds are disseminated.<\/p>\n But the NIH policy is very very far from true open access<\/a>. First, it is not immediate – authors can (and to publish in many journals must) delay free access to their articles for up to a year. And second, it provides access in only the narrowest of senses – the ability to read an article. Most of the articles made available under the NIH policy can not be redistributed, and, more crucially, their availability to the community for use in text mining or other forms of reuse is unclear, and probably limited. And if you don’t think this matters, read this great article<\/a> in the Guardian today about how the negative consequences of the current roadblocks to data mining the contents of the scientific literature.<\/p>\n So what the petition is really about is pushing for an expansion of delayed free access to the scientific literature. A strategic victory for sure, and maybe an important one. But not open access.<\/p>\n