 Which is the most accurate representation of the relationship between authors and copyright issues in OA?
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. 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.” But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. 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.) In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or 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. This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue.
 Authors do not lose any more rights to their work than they would publishing in more conventional venues
 The authors have less control over what happens with their work  Authors do not want to publish in OA venues because of the constant legal battles  Publicly available content is more likely to be stolen and reproduced without permission  Authors do not lose any more rights to their work than they would publishing in more conventional venues