 What is the main premise of OA?
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. OA removes price barriers. OA removes these permission barriers. 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). 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. For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.” The purpose of OA is to remove barriers to all legitimate scholarly uses for scholarly literature, but there’s no legitimate scholarly purpose in suppressing attribution to the texts we use. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.) The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. 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. In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. 1.1 What Makes OA Possible? OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. 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.
 To make research literature available online without price barriers or without most permission barriers.
 To make research literature available online without price barriers or without most permission barriers.  To allow researchers to reuse literature for scholarly purposes.  To allow reproduction and distribution by readers.  To allow readers to write derivative works.