Practitioners, patients, researchers, and caregivers are locked out of the medical research they need. Together with users, the Open Access Button requests paywalled articles to be shared by authors.

Paywalls are frustrating. We’ve all been locked out of research, whether we’re writing a paper or researching the disease of a loved one. Our request system asks authors to share their work with researchers, journalists, students, and the curious. We’ve received almost ten thousand requests for paywalled research.

Four years ago this week two undergraduate students had the idea for what became the Open Access Button — a browser extension for people to report paywalls and share why they needed access to the paper.

For the past year, the Open Access Button has been working to integrate our service with library catalogs and interlibrary loan systems — to surface accessible copies of articles directly through library discovery systems and fulfill interlibrary loan requests instantly when accessible copies are available in repositories.

We’ve been working on how to get around paywalls legally and connect people with accessible versions of papers since 2013. It’s a hard problem to solve! That’s why we’re so pleased to see Unpaywall and oaDOI (from the team behind Impactstory) working on this problem. Unpaywall and oaDOI are terrifically designed browser plugins and websites that instantly and legally find accessible copies of articles, if they are available.

We listened to your feedback and released an updated site this week. Overall the site is a bit prettier, but there are some good features to highlight: You can now download our plugins with one click from the homepage. Find and request open research right away when hitting a paywall without opening another window.

Need research? Give us an article url and we’ll find you a legal copy We have exciting news — you can now search for research directly on the Open Access Button homepage. Visit openaccessbutton.org, paste the url of the article you need, and we’ll find it for you. No account or plug-in needed! Let us instantly and legally connect you to the research you need. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

21 October 2014 For Immediate Release Contact: Joseph McArthur, +447732634892 October 21, 2014 media@openaccessbutton.org Open Access Button Benefits Students, Researchers and General Public London, England . The Open Access Button today launched a suite of new apps to help researchers, patients, students and the public get access to scientific and scholarly research.

28 October 2016 During the past six months we’ve been quiet, but magic was going on behind the scenes. Over the coming months we’ll talk more about what’s happened, what’s changed, and what’ll happen next. But now, we have five major changes to tell you about: 1. Find and request articles and data The Open Data Button has now been combined with the Open Access Button.

7 March 2016 People can find, request, and share research data with the Open Data Button The Open Access Button today announces the beta release of the Open Data Button, a tool to help people find the data underlying research papers and request the release of new data. Every day, researchers cannot access the research data needed to verify results and build on others’ research.

3 March 2016 The Open Data Button has now soft launched. You can use the Button, see your requests and share them. After a few early hiccups (see tweets) we’re now planning to push the Open Data Button out to people early next week. Stay tuned for more, especially our next post on Open Data Day.