Peter Suber

Shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work.

There are lamentably many problems for which OA is part of the solution.

There are many ways to deliver OA: personal web sites, blogs, wikis, databases, ebooks, videos, audios, webcasts, discussion forums, RSS feeds, and P2P networks.

Authors control the volume and growth of OA. They decide whether to submit their work to OA journals (gold OA), whether to deposit their work in OA repositories (green OA), and how to use their copyrights.

Any kind of content can be digitized, and any kind of digital content can be put online without price or permission barriers. In that sense, the potential scope of OA is universal.

OA could be implemented badly so that it infringes copyright. But so could conventional publishing.

Many publishers who oppose OA concede that OA is better for research and researchers than toll access. They merely object that we can’t pay for it. But we can pay for it.

Will a general shift to OA leave casualties? For example, will rising levels of green OA trigger cancellations of toll-access journals?

One transition complexity is the fresh convert who supports OA in theory but doesn’t understand how to pay for it, how to support peer review, how to avoid copyright infringement, how to avoid violating academic freedom, etc.

Publishing in an OA journal is like publishing in a conventional journal. Find a suitable journal and submit your manuscript.