Turning Paywalls into Opportunity: The Open Access Button has Arrived

The Open Access Button, brainchild of undergraduate medical students David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, was designed to tackle the frustration shared by millions of individuals who search for research articles online, only to have their progress slowed – and often halted – by paywall pages requesting payment in exchange for viewing the article.

...The Open Access Button is a bookmarklet that you can download for free and add to the toolbar of your web browser. When you are next confronted with a publisher paywall page requesting payment for viewing a journal article, you simply click on the Open Access Button bookmark. The OA Button does two things: First, it instantly records rich information about your experience – the article you wanted to access, your reason for wanting to access it, your location – and second, help you to find a free, author-deposited version of the article using Google Scholar.

The Open Access Button is designed to raise awareness of the problem of paywalls, and to add to the growing call to make Open Access the default mode for scientific and scholarly journal publishing...