In my research of open access tools, I came across this feature called the Open Access Button. It is a web browser extension that, when you feed it a url of a paywalled article, it will try to find it for free somewhere else.

This process is totally legal, since the papers were republished or allowed to be distributed on other platforms. So you aren’t torrenting or pirating any content.

If your article of interest is not found in their database, they will contact the author and request either the paper or the data used depending on what you ask for. Their goal is to make sharing information and data very easy and they hope that making this platform will demonstrate that there are benefits to making such content available.

Initial Thoughts

This is a really cool feature and the Chrome extension makes getting access really quick. The extendability that it promises, working with Open Science Framework to store requested data, and hosting papers in a repository that anyone in the future can access, are all really exciting as open access becomes more usable and accepted.

There are some drawbacks. Very few (3 of 20) papers that I searched had available papers and one of them was an incorrect match. This sad statistic is conflated with the fact that I mainly searched for papers about enzyme kinetics (2/15; one false positive) and the small sample size. Perhaps it is more a commentary on the types of journals that allow their content to be available rather than the database quality that The Button uses.

All in all I am excited to keep using this and trying it out. In the video, they mention adding a feature that lets you contact the author instead of the platform doing it for you. This would be a really great way to be able to connect with scientists and allow for more discourse, sharing of knowledge, and providing a more personal experience with data/literature searches.

What do you think? What sort of articles do you search for that are paywalled and which ones can The Button find for you? Comment below, or tweet at me!