 What does removing price barriers mean for readers?
Suppose that selling their work would actually harm their interests by shrinking their audience, reducing their impact, and distorting their professional goals by steering them toward popular topics and away from the specialized questions on which they are experts. A price tag is a significant access barrier. OA removes price barriers. As a result, users may be hampered in their research by barriers erected to serve intermediaries rather than authors. Removing price barriers means that readers are not limited by their own ability to pay, or by the budgets of the institutions where they may have library privileges. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. 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. 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 . 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. 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. Second, academics have salaries from universities, freeing them to dive deeply into their research topics and publish specialized articles without market appeal. Scholars can afford to ignore sales because they have salaries and research grants to take the place of royalties.
 Readers are not limited by their own ability to pay.
 Readers are not limited by the budgets of libraries.  Readers can translate and redistribute work.  Readers can reuse literature for scholarly purposes.  Readers are not limited by their own ability to pay.