question:  What is the access revolution?
context: 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. About thirty years ago this kind of free global sharing became something new under the sun. Digital technologies have created more than one 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. 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. 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. 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. The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. 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. This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It’s a payment structure we need for good research itself, not just for good access to research, and it’s the key to the legal and economic lock that would otherwise shackle steps toward OA.
output:  Authors can share their work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost.
options:  Globally more homes than ever before have access to the internet.  Free global sharing.  Authors are giving away their work for free.  Authors can share their work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost.