Today is the White House’s Champions of Change event celebrating Open Science. You can watch and join in at 1PM US Eastern time today.

But on this day, I wanted to remind everyone that “open” is a word that comes with history and, more importantly, with meaning. It’s not a word that someone can take and sprinkle on their work and claim without understanding the history and the meaning. If someone does that, they are going to get bullshit called on them - like the Yale-Medtronic supposedly open data agreement, which is anything but open.

So let’s get this clear. Just because you’re making something available that wasn’t previously available doesn’t qualify as open. Just because you’re reducing the transaction costs of access to something doesn’t qualify as open. Just because you’re involving more people than before doesn’t qualify as open.

Open means that there is no prejudice against any kind of user, anywhere, any time. Open means that commercial use is allowed, in advance. Open means that new works, new research, new products are allowed, in advance. Open means following the Open Definition.

Here’s the Definition. It’s short and sweet.

The reason for a definition is so that the word open actually means something. Open is a great word. But it has to mean something for it to mean anything. And it’s hard to meet this definition. It means you can’t be granular, or differential, or non-commercial, or academics only, or only for some kinds of uses in science and not for other kinds of uses. It means a bright line test that a project either meets or doesn’t meet.

The Yale-Medtronic example is a classic case of misappropriation of the word open. It’s anything but. Yet there goes the science establishment trumpeting it as such.

If “open” is going to mean something in science the way it means something in culture and in software, those of us who’ve spent years toiling in the trenches have to collectively examine, carefully, every claim to open science. And we have to speak truth to power, to hold those who would claim openness as their mantle to the definitions and call them out when they fail to meet them.

Otherwise, the nascent open science movement will suffocate under the weight of semi-open science, content that is segregated by incompatible and overly restrictive licenses, data that comes with complex terms of use, service, field of use restrictions, and patents that pop up out of the blue when open projects attempt to scale.

Being open - really open - is hard to do. It doesn’t give the people what they want. As Bob Young noted in his keynote at this year’s Sage Congress, what people wanted out of Red Hat software was for it to run Microsoft Office.

He didn’t give them that. He gave them what they needed, which was the right and the power to control their own operating systems. And people thought he was crazy for not giving them what they wanted, for not compromising on open, right up until Red Hat was so successful that everyone agreed it had been obvious all along that open was the smart choice.

It wasn’t easy being open in software, then. It isn’t easy now in science. But the value comes over the long term from the decision of a small set of people being unreasonably committed to making true public goods. Today’s event is a small but pivotal step in recognizing those people, and in carrying those true public goods forward.