 Why is academic work considered low-hanging fruit?
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. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. It’s enough to know that their employers pay them salaries, freeing them to give away their work, that they write for impact rather than money, and that they score career points when they make the kind of impact they hoped to make. Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. But when a scholar needs to read or consult hundreds of works for one research project, or when a library must provide access for thousands of faculty and students working on tens of thousands of topics, and when the volume of new work grows explosively every year, price barriers become insurmountable. The resulting access gaps harm authors by limiting their audience and impact, harm readers by limiting what they can retrieve and read, and thereby harm research from both directions. OA removes price barriers. Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. 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 . 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.
 There are no royalties to worry about
 It is easy to convince academics to do things for free  There are fewer potential revenue loss issues because authors still get money for open access work  There are no royalties to worry about  It is a general expectation that academics make their work freely available anyway