Arcadia Fund Increases Support for our Work

• 2 min read

We’re thrilled to announce that Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, has generously committed to continue its support of our work with a four-year, $1,870,000 grant. Building on the investments we’ve already made in the past couple of years thanks to Arcadia, we’ll use this to double down on our flagship tools such as InstantILL.org and Shareyourpaper.org that make it easier to make papers Open Access and improve researchers’ ability to do their work without expensive subscriptions.

The Arcadia Fund Logo

Working in partnership with libraries, we will help institutions move away from big deals toward a more equitable system for sharing research and scholarship. As subscriptions become a less important way for libraries to deliver access, InstantILL.org ensures libraries can still provide a first-class user experience and keep fulfillment costs low. Shareyourpaper.org ensures that self-archiving, a critical route to Open Access that doesn’t rely on author payment, is dramatically easier to use and easy for libraries to facilitate at the scale required.

Already we’ve made significant progress on these objectives. A few of our favourite highlights over the past few years have been:

  • Bringing Open into Interlibrary Loan, which culminated with launching InstantILL in partnership with IUPUI and having over 350 libraries interested in using it. En route, our earlier tools such as DeliverOA, EmbedOA, and OAsheet got used over half a million times to support ILL.
  • Showing just how easy making your work Open Access can be with Shareyourpaper.org, and having a ball building it with Montana State University, Our Research, and André Sartori at University of Cambridge.
  • Extending our partnership with the library community into sustaining our tools, with our new Leadership Tier delivering new features and support in return for investing back some of the savings from using our tools.
  • And dozens of other highlights, such as partnering with IFLA on RSCVD to fulfill ILL access during the pandemic; Direct2AAM pioneering a new way to find author accepted manuscripts to make open and getting used by institutions across the globe; seeing libraries like UC, MIT, University of Cambridge and more recommend the Open Access Button; and reading stories from users.

We believe Arcadia’s investment will enable us to be an even better partner in a time when library budgets are tighter and more uncertain than ever. A partner that can be relied on to serve the community through this crisis and beyond, to build powerfully simple tools accessible for free, forever.

We wholeheartedly thank Arcadia for their vision and commitment to Open Access, and we look forward to building the next generation of tools for open research.

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Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, supports charities and scholarly institutions to preserve cultural heritage, protect the environment, and promote open access. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $678 million in grants to projects around the world.

The Open Access Button builds tools that make it simpler to do research without subscriptions. Our family of tools is community-owned, open source, and built not for profit, but for change. The Open Access Button is supported by SPARC, a global library coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education.