PMR: Note the term “OA journal”. This term is widely used but is not required by the BBB declarations. In general use it means a journal in which all the articles are necessarily (e.g. BOAJ uses:

LA: Open Access Journal:
We define open access journals as journals that use a funding model that does not charge readers or their institutions for access. From the BOAI definition [1] of “open access” we take the right of users to “read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles” as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.
[1] http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/boaifaq.htm#openaccess

LA: What is OA?

OA removes the price and permission barriers from free access to scientific research:

• No subscriptions, licencing or pay-per-view fees;
• No copyright restrictions.

Other OA publishers may apply slightly different terms. The Budapest Open Access Initiative explains this:

There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to this literature. 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. 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.

The Bethesda and Berlin statements also comment on this point. For a work to be OA the copyright holder must consent to let readers:

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…

Collectively these three constitute the core definition of OA. However, OA journals are also required to provide immediate full-text access to published work rather than just abstracts or article metadata.

PMR: So far, so good.

[…]

The primary difference between OA publishing and non-OA publishing is that the costs associated with publishing the journal are paid by the authors rather than the readers and hence do not act as barriers to access.

PMR: I disagree. There are several hybrid “OA” offerings where costs are paid by the authors but which fail to remove permission barriers. This will be a concern later on.

LA: OA publishing and copyright

There are two key aspects to how copyright relates to OA publishing.

The copyright holders (the authors) consent to unrestricted reading, downloading, copyrighting, sharing, storing, printing, searching and linking to the full text of the work. LA’s licence prevents misattribution and selective reuse to prevent plagiarism, misrepresentation and questionable scholarship.

Where an author has re-used content not in the public domain in an OA work, the consent of the copyright holder must be given.

Therefore, we can say that OA publishing is not comparable to peer-to-peer file sharing for science, and OA publishing is always voluntary.

In its conventional form OA publishing is also royalty-free. Authors effectively give their work to the world without expectation of payment. We believe that in the future it may be possible to publish text books in a manner resembling OA but with royalty payments made to the authors.

[…]
Beneficiaries of OA publishing
[…]

Readers gain barrier-free access to research material without library-imposed restrictions. OA published material is accessible from anywhere that a connection to the Internet is available via high-availability research tools such as Google and Entrez Pubmed, and this material is also freely applied to current and future indexing, mining, summarising, translating, querying, linking, recommending, alerting and aggregation tools, and other forms of data processing and analysis.

Teachers and their students gain free and equal access to content and negates the need for permissions to reproduce. Sharing material is simplified and free.

[…]

All citizens gain by having access to peer-reviewed research which is generally not offered by public libraries. Access to such material provides citizens with a counter-point to questionable statements made in less credible sources. It also gives them access to research funded by their taxes. Under conventional publishing, publishers are effectively given exclusive rights to profit from research paid for by tax payers.