 What is the access revolution?
What Is 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. Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. 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. 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. 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. 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. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. 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). Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA: There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature.
 Authors can share their work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost.
 Globally more homes than ever before have access to the internet.  Free global sharing.  Authors are giving away their work for free.  Authors can share their work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost.