 Which of these has the least to gain from going open access as presented in this article?
If authors like that exist, at least they should take advantage of the access 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. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. While every kind of OA removes price barriers, there are many different permission barriers we could remove if we wanted to. If we remove price barriers alone, we provide gratis OA , and if we remove at least some permission barriers as well, we provide libre OA . 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. 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. 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. 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.
 A short film producer looking to make a name for herself
 A short film producer looking to make a name for herself  An independently wealthy poet looking for people to read their work  A tenured faculty member wanting to publish their work on a very specialized topic  A graduate student in the sciences looking to publish their research