 Which is the most accurate representation of the relationship between authors and copyright issues in OA?
Open access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OA removes price barriers. Copyright can also be a significant access barrier. These purposes include reading and searching, but also redistributing, translating, text mining, migrating to new media, long-term archiving, and innumerable new forms of research, analysis, and processing we haven’t yet imagined. 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. 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). 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. For a work to be OA, the copyright holder must consent in advance to let users “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship.” But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. 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. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.) The basic idea of OA is simple: Make research literature available online without price barriers and without most permission barriers. 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. OA is made possible by the internet and copyright-holder consent. 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.
 Authors do not lose any more rights to their work than they would publishing in more conventional venues
 The authors have less control over what happens with their work  Authors do not want to publish in OA venues because of the constant legal battles  Publicly available content is more likely to be stolen and reproduced without permission  Authors do not lose any more rights to their work than they would publishing in more conventional venues