 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. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. 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. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. (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.
 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