Unlike business content or political content, which serves certain people's purpose and is appropriate in the context of specific location and time, scientific content is supposed to be universally applicable. Thus access to scientific content may differ from access to business or political contents.
Opposite to the open access model is regulated access, in which case, the access platform owners put certain rules on accessible scientific content. As owners are often in some business, their rules reflect those businesses.
One example is general interest. In politics, general opinion decide, in science, majority thinking may not be relevant. Who is interested in a particular research result is not an integral part of that result.
Another example is importance. Many owners hold the belief that their platforms are important, so are the works recorded in their platform, but self claimed importance is not really important, the place where scientific results are accessible is not science by itself. A platform can be important only if it helps people accessing scientific results easier.
A third example is urgency. As a prerequisite, scientific results must have lasting value. So it does not matter much when a result is accessible, whether some years earlier or later.
Science, in its raw form, is only about what is universally true, while who, where and when are at most business aspects of a scientific result. In normal development of scientific research, the result was first obtained, then made accessible to others, so that it could go through independent checks, its universal applicability is established during repeated independent tests. Within the process, accessibility is only one step, no result becomes science immediately when it is made accessible by some platform. The primary scientific activity includes hard work to obtain the result prior to accessibility, and subsequent repeated independent checks that eventually decide the true value of the result. Only after those scientific activity can the proved validity give rise to business values, i.e. universally valid results are pertinent to everyone (general interest, important) so that people should know it earlier (urgency).
As the universal validity of a result can only be established after accessibility followed by repeatable independent checks, talking about the business value of a result prior to the accessible time is premature and likely misleading. Unfortunately, these business aspects are regularly asked by platform owners in decision on accessibility, which often dilute, and sometimes even displace the scientific value of a result. While readers are often distracted from scientific value by those business value, accessibility of raw research is made artificially troublesome for authors.
In addition, the original writing of a scientific result represents the genesis of that result, thus serves as the birth record of that result. Due to the long lasting value of a scientific result, its birth record, as manifested by the original writing, bears value that is absent from business augmented writings.
The emphasis on business value is hard to avoid on a regulated platform as the platform is indeed a business. On the other hand, open access model, by definition, looks promising in bypassing premature requirement of business value. In fact, universality implies openness as both are free of business impact of a particular party. In an open model, accessibility becomes easy, so both readers and authors will focus more on the raw universal value of scientific results. In that sense, open access in science is close to free speech in politics, as it provides equal opportunity for each result.
It would be interesting to see how open access contributes to the advancement of science. If luckily, someone will be able to afford such a trial.