OA button weekly update: T-minus 8 weeks

Aug 26, 2013 • 2 min read

Hey there!

Welcome to the first of many Open Access Button Weekly updates. Throughout this project we’ve been blown away by the response of the OA community. Through twitter, blogs and chatting to folk the button is going to so much better than it ever could’ve been. We’d like these updates to be a window into what we’re doing — the successes and the challenges we’re facing. They’re for the community, so we’d love to have comments and discussion where possible around these, and if possible a bit of help. Expect them to be light hearted and a bit rough around the edges though!

This week saw the release of our PLoS student blog. The response to it was just fantastic. In 48 hours it got 1000+ hits and the response on twitter was astounded. It was a great “launch” for our new public google groups — where we’ll be trying to interact with people in a more expansive way.

The week also saw the completion of our long awaited code port, so we’re now coding in Python. This was hoped to improve the number of people who could code for us and increase what we could do! This combined with our minimum viable product and Github issues means we’re now ripe and ready to make great progress.

Slightly out of the blue we decided to throw together a OAbutton hackathon — which is very nearly confirmed. More to follow on this! Similarly out the blue as great conversations with folks from Wikimedia which have us giddy with excitement.

The project still faces significant challenges. As I write this we’re seeking we’re still without a small design team to make the button look fancy. We’d also be keen to hear from people who’re great at producing awesome videos — we’re going to be need some of those very soon! News about hackday is soon to follow

Until next week, have a good one!

The OA button team

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