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The incipient clash between open access and intellectual property need not come to a head as long as the exercise of authorship rights does not contradict free access for end users. The existence of strong moral prerogatives offers the very guarantees that the scientific community is pressing for: identification of sources and traceability of the original version of a publication. The picture is not so well-tempered in the case of the Public Access movement, which has little concern for authorship and is entirely geared to knowledge dissemination as compensation for the taxpayers’ money spent on research. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would deny the very existence of authorship rights for researchers, who would lose all control over the dissemination of their work. However, the alternative solution proposed may not necessarily produce the desired results, since researchers need to have a certain amount of freedom in their work and in their communication to motivate high-quality output. Short-circuiting their intellectual control over the fate of their research is more likely to inhibit them than otherwise. But the clash between these two aspirations may yet be resolved: achieving free access does not necessarily mean destroying freedom for research.