 In which chapter can we find out more about OA economics?
In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. OA removes price barriers. 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). I sometimes refer to their overlap or common ground as the BBB definition of OA. Here’s how the Budapest statement defined OA: There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] literature. 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. 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. The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. Even the implementation is simple enough that the volume of peer-reviewed OA literature and the number of institutions providing it have grown at an increasing rate for more than a decade. 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. (More in chapter 9 on the future.) In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. We can have OA music and movies, news and novels, sitcoms and software—and to different degrees we already do. 1.1 What Makes OA Possible? 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. It frees researchers to challenge conventional wisdom and defend unpopular ideas, which are essential to academic freedom. 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.
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 7  Chapter 5  Chapter 9  Chapter 3