 Which of these is not an expected impact of OA on academic inquiry?
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. 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. 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. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. OA removes these permission barriers. 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. 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. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA: There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature.
 Scholars will be tempted to leave academia to pursue publishing options that they can make money from
 It shoud allow more open discussion of a wide variety of topics  More people will be able to pursue specialized knowledge that does not have a large target audience  There will be less of a reason for researchers to work only inside of popular trends  Scholars will be tempted to leave academia to pursue publishing options that they can make money from