 In which section can we find more about peer review?
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. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. 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. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. Note that all three legs of the BBB definition go beyond removing price barriers to removing permission barriers, or beyond gratis OA to libre 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. Moreover, any kind of content can be digital: texts, data, images, audio, video, multimedia, and executable code. 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.
 Section 5.1
 Section 5.1  Section 5.3  Section 5.7  Section 5.5