Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
What Is Open Access? Digital technologies have created more than one revolution. Let’s call this one the access revolution. Why don’t more authors take advantage of the access revolution to reach more readers? The answer is pretty clear. Authors who share their works in this way aren’t selling them, and even authors with purposes higher than money depend on sales to make a living. Or at least they appreciate sales. 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. These lucky authors are scholars, and the works they customarily write and publish without payment are peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals. 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. We could call it “barrier-free” access, but that would emphasize the negative rather than the positive. In any case, we can be more specific about which access barriers OA removes. A price tag There are many degrees and kinds of wider and easier access to [research] 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. Newcomers to OA often assume that OA helps readers and hurts authors, and that the reader side of the scholarly soul must beg the author side to make the necessary sacrifice. But OA benefits authors as well as readers. Authors want access to readers at least as much as readers want access to authors. All authors want to cultivate a larger audience and greater impact. Authors who work for royalties have reason to compromise and settle for the smaller audience of paying customers. But authors who aren’t paid for their writing have no reason to compromise. Another aspect of author self-interest emerges from the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles, even when they are published in the same issue of the same journal. There’s growing evidence that OA articles are downloaded more often as well, and that journals converting to OA see a rise in their submissions and citation impact. There are many hypotheses to explain the correlation between OA and increased citations, but it’s likely that ongoing studies will show that much of the correlation is simply due to the larger audience and heightened visibility provided by OA itself. When you enlarge the audience for an article, you also enlarge the subset of the audience that will later cite it, including professionals in the same field at institutions unable to afford subscription access. OA enlarges the potential audience, including the potential professional audience, far beyond that for even the most prestigious and popular subscription journals. In any case, these studies bring a welcome note of author self-interest to the case for OA. OA is not a sacrifice for authors who write for impact rather than money. It increases a work’s visibility, retrievability, audience, usage, and citations, which all convert to career building. For publishing scholars, it would be a bargain even if it were costly, difficult, and time-consuming. But as we’ll see, it’s not costly, not difficult, and not time-consuming. My colleague Stevan Harnad frequently compares research articles to advertisements. They advertise the author’s research. Try telling advertisers that they’re making a needless sacrifice by allowing people to read their ads without having to pay for the privilege. Advertisers give away their ads and even pay to place them where they might be seen. They do this to benefit themselves, and scholars have the same interest in sharing their message as widely as possible. The Budapest Open Access Initiative said in February 2002: “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment. . . . The new technology is the internet.” To see what this willingness looks like without the medium to give it effect, look at scholarship in the age of print. Author gifts turned into publisher commodities, and access gaps for readers were harmfully large and widespread. (Access gaps are still harmfully large and widespread, but only because OA is not yet the default for new research.) To see what the medium looks like without the willingness, look at music and movies in the age of the internet. The need for royalties keeps creators from reaching everyone who would enjoy their work. A beautiful opportunity exists where the willingness and the medium overlap. A scholarly custom that evolved in the seventeenth century frees scholars to take advantage of the access revolution in the twentieth and twenty-first. Because scholars are nearly unique in following this custom, they are nearly unique in their freedom to take advantage of this revolution without financial risk. In this sense, the planets have aligned for scholars. Most other authors are constrained to fear rather than seize the opportunities created by the internet. We could talk about vigilante OA, infringing OA, piratical OA, or OA without consent. That sort of OA could violate copyrights and deprive royalty-earning authors of royalties against their will. But we could also talk about vigilante publishing, infringing publishing, piratical publishing, or publishing without consent. Both happen. However, we generally reserve the term “publishing” for lawful publishing, and tack on special adjectives to describe unlawful variations on the theme. Likewise, I’ll reserve the term “open access” for lawful OA that carries the consent of the relevant rightsholder. OA isn’t primarily about bringing access to lay readers. If anything, the OA movement focuses on bringing access to professional researchers whose careers depend on access. But there’s no need to decide which users are primary and which are secondary. The publishing lobby sometimes argues that the primary beneficiaries of OA are lay readers, perhaps to avoid acknowledging how many professional researchers lack access, or perhaps to set up the patronizing counter-argument that lay people don’t care to read research literature and wouldn’t understand it if they tried. OA is about bringing access to everyone with an internet connection who wants access, regardless of their professions or purposes. There’s no doubt that if we put “professional researchers” and “everyone else” into separate categories, a higher percentage of researchers will want access to research literature, even after taking into account that many already have paid access through their institutions. But it’s far from clear why that would matter, especially when providing OA to all internet users is cheaper and simpler than providing OA to just a subset of worthy internet users. If party-goers in New York and New Jersey can both enjoy the Fourth of July fireworks in New York Harbor, then the sponsors needn’t decide that one group is primary, even if a simple study could show which group is more numerous. If this analogy breaks down, it’s because New Jersey residents who can’t see the fireworks gain nothing from New Yorkers who can. But research does offer this double or indirect benefit. When OA research directly benefits many lay readers, so much the better. But when it doesn’t, it still benefits everyone indirectly by benefiting researchers directly. (Also see section 5.5.1 on access for lay readers.) Finally, OA isn’t universal access. Even when we succeed at removing price and permission barriers, four other kinds of access barrier might remain in place: open access

<question>:
How do authors benefit from open access?

<options>:
A There is potential for more citations because of the relative accessibility of the work
B Papers get published faster in open-access journals
C It is easier to get published in an open-access journal than one with a paywall
D Readership could increase because open-access journals advertise more accessibly

<answer>:

A