 How do authors benefit from open access?
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. 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. Most works with price tags are individually affordable. Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. 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. 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.) The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. 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.
 There is potential for more citations because of the relative accessibility of the work
 There is potential for more citations because of the relative accessibility of the work  Papers get published faster in open-access journals  It is easier to get published in an open-access journal than one with a paywall  Readership could increase because open-access journals advertise more accessibly