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.

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.

Practitioners, patients, researchers, and caregivers are locked out of the medical research they need. Together with users, the Open Access Button requests paywalled articles to be shared by authors.

Paywalls are frustrating. We’ve all been locked out of research, whether we’re writing a paper or researching the disease of a loved one. Our request system asks authors to share their work with researchers, journalists, students, and the curious. We’ve received almost ten thousand requests for paywalled research.