 What is the relationship between conventional publishing and open access?
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. If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access revolution. The dream of global free access can be a reality for them, even if most other authors hope to earn royalties and feel obliged to sit out this particular 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. Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. In addition, replacing user freedom with permission-seeking harms research authors by limiting the usefulness of their work, harms research readers by limiting the uses they may make of works even when they have access, and thereby harms research from both directions. 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 only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. 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. In principle, any kind of digital content can be OA, since any digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. 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. Creative people who live by royalties, such as novelists, musicians, and moviemakers, may consider this scholarly tradition a burden and sacrifice for scholars.
 Many people interact with both, and each side is adapting over time to the needs of the readers and authors
 They tend to attract scholars of different disciplines, staying separate from one another  Conventional publishing is better for authors but open access is better for the readers  Many people interact with both, and each side is adapting over time to the needs of the readers and authors  Venues pick one or the other option and are classified as such