Open Access Button Update: April 21

Open Governance
The Open Access Button strives to be an open project that strengthens the Open movement. The source code of the Button is open and freely available through GitHuB, the data gathered by the Button will be open and freely available, and now the guiding and main documents of the project will be open and freely available to the public. The guiding documents are now available through our Open Governance page.

New Feature
One of our developers Victor Ng has been working on a new feature for the Button. This feature will further help users get access to research papers by collecting links to open access versions of publications.

The feature will work by trying to determine the author’s email address the first time a paper’s paywall is reported, and then an automatic email would be sent to notify the author that the research is unavailable to the public. Then we would provide a link to the author who can submit an open version of their paper. There is some work ahead, but we’ll be adding the feature in the coming weeks. Learn more about this feature through Victor’s latest post “Upgrading the Open Access Button.”

Roundtable Meeting
On April 10, we held a Roundtable Meeting in London to discuss the future of the Open Access Button. Co-Lead David Carroll, Strategy Lead Penny Andrews, Donna Okubo (PLOS), Shane Canning (BioMed Central), Peter Murray Rust (OKFN), Stephen Curry (Imperial College), David Guedj (European Commission), Cecy Marden (Wellcome Trust), Nancy Pontika (Royal Holloway), Jon Tennant (Imperial College), Kim Coles (Royal Holloway), Victor Ng (Mozilla) were in attendance.

The Team
Last week we welcomed six new members to our Steering Committee. Our Steering Committee now holds expertise in advocacy, fundraising, copyright law, programming, governance, communications, and technology in the Global South. You can learn more about the whole committee on the Steering Committee page.

We’re also still looking for a Communications Officer,Treasury Assistant, and Graphic Designer. Do you know someone who would be great in one of those roles? Encourage them to apply!

Get your personalised Open Access Button at openaccessbutton.org
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