In April we shared the incredible response we’d seen in RSCVD’s first week supporting resource sharing for those affected by COVID-19 having built and launched it in partnership with IFLA. Today, we’re reposting an update from IFLA’s blog as the service has gone from strength to strength, and transitions into becoming not an emergency response, but long term

We’re incredibly proud that one of our tiny team, Natalia Norori, has been profiled by Forbes as a young leader for her work with us and her project Health Data Sharing Is Caring. We’ve been lucky to work with Natalia for years to lead implementation of our request system and self-archiving work, including Shareyourpaper.org.

This isn’t a post about what we’re doing in response to COVID-19. Instead, we’re sharing how we planned to respond as an act of transparency to our community. It’s also an opportunity to get feedback, and we hope that it’s something that others can use to guide their thinking.

After an extensive competitive search, we’re proud to announce that cOAlition S, an international consortium of research funders working towards making full and immediate Open Access a reality, has chosen Shareyourpaper.org Permissions to supply self-archiving policy data for their new Plan S Journal Checker Tool. Shareyourpaper.org Permissions is our new open source automated permissions checking system.

We’ve been lucky enough to have many people review our tools over the years, and we appreciate them all.

There are major updates to our tools and data to make permissions checking easier, faster, and clearer for libraries on our new website, with their new name, “Shareyourpaper.org Permissions.” On the new website you’ll find our new API, streamlined bulk permissions checking spreadsheets, a larger open dataset, and more details about how we’re doing permissions checking.

If your library’s ability to do resource sharing (i.e. ILL or document delivery) has been impacted by COVID-19, help is at hand. Interlibrary loan professionals at non-profit institutions can head to rscvd.org and volunteer librarians around the world will help to supply materials. If you’re not having trouble filling requests, fantastic!

The Coronavirus pandemic has shown how critical it is that research is shared quickly and freely. We can’t go back to “b̶u̶s̶i̶n̶e̶s̶s̶ research as usual” and keep locking up the world’s research behind paywalls. That’s why we’re proud to debut Shareyourpaper.org to make it easy to share your work for anyone to read — freely and legally.

Our business model aims to ensure that financially supporting open source, community-owned tools that provide key features for free is easy and richly rewarded. Today, we’re releasing a part of this program: a showcase for institutions that are enabling our work. We’re also proud to welcome two founding leaders that have recently joined us, the University of Alberta and Liberate Science.

This week, a group of the largest publishers launched a new service, GetFTR, ostensibly designed to help readers get easier access to the full text of journal articles from their sites. Sounds good, but hang on — there’s a reason why commercial players are scrambling to launch such services: to maintain control. The pioneers in doing this have been non-profit, open source initiatives: ourselves and Unpaywall.