We’re beginning InstantILL’s Beta, and releasing a new website at InstantILL.org. Now you can learn about InstantILL and try it yourself, with a step by step demo that walks you through all the features. During the Beta, we’ll invite the over 300 libraries on our waiting list to test InstantILL’s simple, self-setup process to roll out the tool.

The Open Access Button has just released an updated API that will make it simpler both to find and access an article (through publicly accessible content, subscription content, or an ILL) and to enable access by emailing authors who directly deposit their content.

Today, we’re sharing our draft plan for succession and contingency planning: openaccessbutton.org/contingency-and-succession-plan. But, fear not, we’re not going anywhere soon. Recently, we responded to the Invest in Open census, an excellent initiative, which included answering the better part of 100 questions on everything from our impact, governance, and funding to the management of our organization, product, and community.

In March, we announced InstantILL, a new, powerfully simple library tool that delivers articles — no subscription needed. Since then, over 250 libraries, of all sizes have joined the waiting list to save money, improve services, and advance Open. Today, we’re debuting the first iteration with our partner, IUPUI University Library.

Introducing shareyourpaper.org , the simplest way for authors to legally self-archive and for your library to fill your repository. Self-archiving needs to be simpler to unleash its power as an equitable route to open access. Yet, it’s too hard for individual repositories to overhaul their existing user experience.

Together with librarians, we’re building a new way to perform permissions checking that is backed by a modern approach and informed by a decade of experience and open, community-editable, machine-readable data.

— Tina Baich, Associate Dean for Collections at Indiana University — Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) University Library and recent chair of ALA’s leading Interlibrary Loan (ILL) group. InstantILL is one box that instantly delivers papers your patrons need and simplifies your ILL process. It’s free and easily set up in minutes.

The below is a guest post written by: Sharon Whitfield and Melissa A. Hofmann at Rider University Libraries . We’re incredibly grateful for their leadership in producing a guide for putting the Open Access Button into another Library Discovery System. If you’d like to see Open Access content included in your systems, head to our Integrations page for instructions for Primo, 360 Link, and SFX*.

The University of California (and many other universities) have canceled their large subscription package to Elsevier as part of an effort to make academic publishing better serve science and society. It’s a noble goal that means scholars at UC might not be able to access your work unless it’s Open Access. But good news!

Successfully encouraging authors to self-archive is difficult. How do you get them to read your emails? Do you tell them everything they need to know at once, or keep it short and succinct? How do you explain what they can share, educate them about their rights, and stop them sending you publisher PDFs? We’ve started to answer these questions while building the Open Access Button’s request system.

This year, we released DeliverOA to make it easier to find self-archived Open Access versions of articles and deliver them inside ILL workflows in major tools. Today, we’re releasing an update to make it easier to deliver Open Access content for practitioners using Alma, by Ex Libris. Alma is a major tool for document-delivery practitioners around the globe.