 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. I mean a group of authors defined by their topics, genres, purposes, incentives, and institutional circumstances, not by their wealth. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. 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. 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. Scholarly journals haven’t paid authors for their articles since the first scholarly journals, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London and the Journal des sçavans , launched in London and Paris in 1665. The academic custom to write research articles for impact rather than money may be a lucky accident that could have been otherwise. This peculiar custom does more than insulate cutting-edge research from the market and free scholars to consent to OA without losing revenue. It also supports academic freedom and the kinds of serious inquiry that advance knowledge. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. At the same time it frees them to microspecialize and defend ideas of immediate interest to just a handful people in the world, which are essential to pushing the frontiers of knowledge. This custom doesn’t guarantee that truth-seeking won’t be derailed by profit-seeking, and it doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eventually fill the smallest gaps in our collaborative understanding of the world. But it removes a major distraction by allowing them, if they wish, to focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell. 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.
 Section 5.1
 Section 5.1  Section 5.3  Section 5.7  Section 5.5