 Why is academic work considered low-hanging fruit?
(That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.) If there are complexities, they lie in the transition from where we are now to a world in which OA is the default for new research. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. Second, scholarly journals generally don’t pay authors for their research articles, which frees this special tribe of authors to consent to OA without losing revenue. This fact distinguishes scholars decisively from musicians and moviemakers, and even from most other kinds of authors.
 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