 How do authors benefit from open access?
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. If you have access to a work for reading but want to translate it into another language, distribute copies to colleagues, copy the text for mining with sophisticated software, or reformat it for reading with new technology, then you generally need the permission of the copyright holder. Removing permission barriers means that scholars are free to use or reuse literature for scholarly purposes. 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. But at the same time, all three allow at least one limit on user freedom: an obligation to attribute the work to the author. (That’s why my shorthand definition says that OA literature is free of “most” rather than “all” copyright and licensing restrictions.) 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. OA to research articles doesn’t depend on asking royalty-earning authors to give up their royalties. Nonacademics who urge academics to come to their senses and demand royalties even for journal articles may be more naive about nonprofit research than academics are about for-profit business.
 There is potential for more citations because of the relative accessibility of the work
 There is potential for more citations because of the relative accessibility of the work  Papers get published faster in open-access journals  It is easier to get published in an open-access journal than one with a paywall  Readership could increase because open-access journals advertise more accessibly