 What is the relationship between conventional publishing and open access?
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. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. 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. If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular revolution. Open access is the name of the revolutionary kind of access these authors, unencumbered by a motive of financial gain, are free to provide to their readers. Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. 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. 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. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. 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. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. 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 .
 Many people interact with both, and each side is adapting over time to the needs of the readers and authors
 They tend to attract scholars of different disciplines, staying separate from one another  Conventional publishing is better for authors but open access is better for the readers  Many people interact with both, and each side is adapting over time to the needs of the readers and authors  Venues pick one or the other option and are classified as such