 Why is academic work considered low-hanging fruit?
As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. 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. In the jargon, OA delivered by journals is called gold OA , and OA delivered by repositories is called green OA . 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). (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.) 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. This is complicated because the major obstacles are not technical, legal, or economic, but cultural. In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. 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. Both facts are critical, but the second is nearly unknown outside the academic world. 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. 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. Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars.
 There are no royalties to worry about
 It is easy to convince academics to do things for free  There are fewer potential revenue loss issues because authors still get money for open access work  There are no royalties to worry about  It is a general expectation that academics make their work freely available anyway