About

We urgently need trusted knowledge that’s fairly owned, created, and read. We’re addressing that by creating a family of library-aligned, open source tools built not-for-profit, but for-change. Our tools make it simpler to do research without subscriptions.

The project started when students got tired of hitting paywalls. Instead of accepting their frustration, they became inspired and took an idea to track the impact of paywalls to a hackday. The Open Access Button was launched in November 2013.

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How it works

Finding free, legal, full-text articles

Thanks to the efforts of librarians, scholars, and technologists and the Open Access movement it’s easier than ever to legally and freely read millions of articles. Our sources include all of the aggregated repositories in the world, hybrid articles, open access journals, and those on authors personal pages.

We don't use content from ResearchGate or Academia.edu.

Our tools for libraries will leverage paid-for subscription to journals, and the interlibrary loan system, a ubiquitous, powerful system for getting access to articles without subscriptions.

Making research available

When an article isn’t freely available we ask the authors to share it by putting it into a repository. We help authors share quickly, legally, and widely so that not only you get access - but everyone does, forever!