 Which is the most accurate representation of the relationship between authors and copyright issues in OA?
Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. For now, it doesn’t matter who these authors are, how rare they are, what they write, or why they follow this peculiar custom. If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. OA removes price barriers. Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. Even these authors, however, tend to transfer their copyrights to intermediaries—publishers—who want to sell their work. OA removes these permission barriers. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. OA makes work more useful in both ways, by making it available to more people who can put it to use, and by freeing those people to use and reuse it. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called gold OA , and OA delivered by repositories is called green OA . While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide gratis OA , and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide libre OA . OA was defined in three influential public statements: the Budapest Open Access Initiative (February 2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (June 2003), and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (October 2003). I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA.
 Authors do not lose any more rights to their work than they would publishing in more conventional venues
 The authors have less control over what happens with their work  Authors do not want to publish in OA venues because of the constant legal battles  Publicly available content is more likely to be stolen and reproduced without permission  Authors do not lose any more rights to their work than they would publishing in more conventional venues