Sunsetting the Open Access Button & InstantILL

On November 18, 2025, we’re shutting down the Open Access Button and InstantILL.

These products helped to create a world where Open Access (OA) is easy to discover wherever you are, and where interlibrary loan (ILL) systems have been strengthened to support big deal cancellations. Shutting down products is always a difficult decision, but robust alternatives now exist to help ensure their legacy continues. This decision will allow the OA.Works team to focus on the most important challenges facing the OA movement today, like using OA.Report to support implementing OA policies and working on ShareYourPaper to ensure that authors can publish without paying article processing charges (APCs).

Today, we’re laying out our plan to shut down these products with minimum impact on users. If you want to keep in touch with OA.Works and follow us as we continue to build tools to make OA easy and equitable, sign up for our newsletter.

What is being shut down?

There are many elements to each of these products, especially the Open Access Button, so it’s worth clearly setting out exactly what is going away:

• The Open Access Button website, APIs, Chrome and Firefox extensions, and resources
• EmbedOA (an embeddable Open Access search bar)
• DeliverOA (ILL system integrations)
• OAsheet (bulk DOI checker)
• InstantILL’s website, embed, and related APIs (/subscription, /ill, /ills).

While these products will be turned off, we aim to be good stewards of the time and trust their users have given us: 

• We’ll provide refunds to InstantILL customers prorated from today.
• We’ll retain any domain names used for as long as OA.Works exists, to prevent abuse.
• We’ll archive our websites with the Internet Archive, and maintain our open-source code in a public archive on Github.
• We’ll delete user accounts and usage data from our servers in early 2026. We’ll retain an anonymized set of the stories associated with requests.

Timeline

We recommend that users migrate to alternative tools as soon as possible.

Alternatives

One key reason why now is the right time to shut down these products is that, in many cases, strong alternatives exist. Here are a few we recommend (in many cases, migrating will take just a few clicks):

Legacy

We’re shutting down these products 12 years after the initial launch of the Open Access Button on November 18, 2013. In that time, these products have contributed to creating a world where Open Access content is easy to find, and that change will continue long after these products have been turned off.

Here are a few examples of what these products have achieved: 

• The Open Access Button had over 200,000 sign-ups and was used over 55 million times to deliver millions of OA articles.
• The Open Access Button helped fuel the OA movement by sharing tens of thousands of personal stories relating to why OA is needed.
• InstantILL powered the early days of RSCVD, which continues to provide free interlibrary loan services globally. Major ILL vendors have cited InstantILL as the inspiration for future directions.
• The Open Access Button played a small part in Unpaywall's rise, and we supported it however we could.

We’re carrying forward into our work today what we’ve learned from building these tools. OA.Report refines many of the early ideas of the Open Access Button in a context where they can be even more effective.

What’s next for OA.Works

After sunsetting these products, we’ll be able to move faster and further to address some of the most important challenges facing the OA movement today. We’ll be focusing our efforts on:

• OA.Report to streamline OA policy compliance checking and follow-ups to put Open Access policies into practice.
• ShareYourPaper to make depositing into repositories simple and support publishing without APCs.

We’re always looking for new challenges, so if you’d like to partner with us to address a problem, please say hi.

If you want to keep in touch with OA.Works as we continue to build tools to make Open Access easy and equitable, sign up for our newsletter.

Thanks to …

A dozen years of working with the community on these products leaves us with too many people to thank, but some special mentions go to:

• the funders of these products, including Arcadia, Jisc, the Center for Open Science, Open Society Foundations, and our crowdfunders;
• our partners, Tina Baich and the IU Indianapolis team, who teamed up with us to build InstantILL;
• our Advisory Committee, which helped us make the tough decision to shut down these tools;
• you—the countless members of the Open Access community who put your faith in us and made our first tool, the Open Access Button, possible! We remain deeply humbled by your support, whether you cheered us on, used the tool and its stories in your work, or contributed to making it all possible with your donations of time, money, and/or expertise.

Need help?

Reach out at help@openaccessbutton.org and help@instantill.org.

Support for our work was provided in part by the Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Arcadia. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of our funders.