The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet which registers when people hit a

paywall A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of ...

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 ''The BMJ'' is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association (BMA). ''The BMJ'' has editorial freedom from the BMA. It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals. Origina ...

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, co ...

. 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 Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre o ...

version of the article. In April 2014 a

crowdfunding Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet. Crowdfunding is a form of crowdsourcing and Alternative Finance, alternative finance. In 2015, over was rais ...

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 ta ...

. 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.

References

External links

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

See also

References

External links