The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet which registers when people hit a paywall to an academic article and cannot access it. It is supported by Medsin UK and the Right to Research Coalition. A prototype was built at a BMJ Hack Weekend. All code is openly available online at

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

. A beta version of the Open Access Button was officially launched on 18 November 2013 at the Berlin 11 Satellite Conference for Students & Early Stage Researchers. It records instances of hitting a paywall, and also provides options to try to locate an open access version of the article. In April 2014 a crowdfunding campaign was started to build a second version. The second version of the button was launched on 21 October 2014 as part of

Open Access Week Open Access Week is an annual scholarly communication event focusing on open access and related topics. It takes place globally during the last full week of October in a multitude of locations both on- and offline. Typical activities include t ...

. In February 2015 the Open Access Button and its co-founders, David Carroll and Joseph McArthur ("the button boys"), were awarded a SPARC Innovator Award by the

Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries developed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1998 which promotes open access to scholarship. The coalition c ...

(SPARC). The third version of the button was launched on 28 October 2016, again, as part of open access week.

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* Open access (publishing) Software add-ons Free Firefox WebExtensions {{internet-stub

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