Today we’re treated to a post by Leila Sterman, our partner at Montana State, on using user testing to build Shareyourpaper.org. If you don’t know shareyourpaper.org, first check out the website and our earlier blogs , as we’ll focus on sharing our progress today. Self-archiving has a reputation for causing confusion.

While building InstantILL, alongside our partners at IUPUI University Library, we documented our engineering work and unusual partnership in a paper that you can read today.

For change, not for profit. We’ve come a long way from our start as rag-tag volunteers out to change the world. As a founder and the director of the Open Access Button, I want to share how we hope to go further, and faster, with the support of libraries. Unveiling your business model is a big moment for any project. So, thankfully, I’m not tasked with justifying how we’ve sacrificed our values to be sustainable.

As we announced in June, shareyourpaper.org automates the deposit workflow — completing forms, checking what you can archive legally, and verifying the correct version is shared — so that authors can upload their papers without libraries having to check their work. These features can reduce the deposit process for your repository to a single click from your website, saving both depositor and library staff time.

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.