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.

Delivering Open Access content through interlibrary loan holds enormous potential for cost savings (as this recent study continues to show), as well as the discovery and creation of Open Access content when it’s needed most. However, it comes with new knowledge for practitioners to learn, and challenges to tackle.

Today, we’re announcing upgrades to our title and citation searching systems for Interlibrary Loan to deliver dramatically better results in Open Access. Testing of items searched using our ILL tools showed our new systems can deliver 30% more results when using titles previously used in DeliverOA. We’ve made these changes in response to the incredible level of adoption of DeliverOA and feedback from our users.

To make it easier for authors to self-archive simply, quickly, and correctly, we’ve created Direct2AAM, a set of guides to turn the often unsuccessful hunt for author accepted manuscripts (AAM) into a simple set of instructions that’ll always bring results.

To advance this work, we would like to collaborate with Interlibrary Loan teams who want their work to open up content, repository teams interested in improving their deposit workflows to increase deposits, and libraries currently reconsidering a big deal package (especially if using Ex-Libris Primo, Alma, or Illiad) who would be interested in learning more about how these tools can give you more leverage in negotiations.

If you’d like to write about these new tools or collaborate on building them get in touch with Joe@openaccessbutton.org. Libraries have led the charge to open up access to the scholarly literature. We want to help turn that leadership into leverage to reduce costs, to save staff time, to improve library services, and to open up more even content and infrastructure.

Since 2013, the Open Access Button has been working to build and support efforts to make free, fast, legal tools for discovering free papers in one click from a paywall and making more articles Open Access. This year, we saw that work expand, accelerate, and mature! Still more to do, so see you in 2018 to get it done, but for now enjoy some GIFs.

Over the past few months we’ve been testing how to deliver Open Access materials in interlibrary loan services at three universities in the United Kingdom in collaboration with Jisc. Learn more about the project and use cases from the following Jisc blog posts: A leaner, faster interlibrary loan service?

At the Open Access Button we go beyond finding research and directly reach out to scholars who publish their work in paywalled journals to ask them to legally share their research. We recently shared a few examples of stories from users who have used the Button to request research they need. With each request we create more freely available research.