On November 18th in Berlin, Germany, in conjunction with this year’s Berlin 11 Open Access meeting, the Max Planck Society and Right to Research Coalition hosted the first-ever satellite conference to the Berlin conference series specifically for students and early stage researchers. The Berlin11 falls in occasion  of the ten  years from born of the “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities” was initiated by the Max Planck Society in October 2003 and signed by more than 440 institutions worldwid. The satellite conference has been focused on rights and open access. In such context has been launched an innovative new tool to help enable access to research was unveiled: the OpenAccess Button.

The OA Button brainchild of two undergraduate medical students David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, is a browser-based tool that lets users track when they are denied access to research, then search for alternative access to the article People are denied access to research hidden behind paywalls every day. This problem is invisible, but it slows innovation, kills curiosity and harms patients. This is an indictment of the current system.  So David Carroll and Joseph McArthur created the Open Access Button to track the impact of paywalls and help people get access to the research they need.

New users reported 190 paywalls hit within the first 24 hours after the beta launch of the Open Access Button.

The button OA is a simple bookmarklet downloaded for free and add to the toolbar of own web browser.  When you are next confronted with a publisher paywall page requesting payment for viewing a journal article, you simply click on the Open Access Button bookmark. In other terms the OA button was designed to tackle the frustration shared by millions of individuals who search for research articles online, only to have their progress slowed – and often halted – by paywall pages requesting payment in exchange for viewing the article. Paywalls are so ubiquitous that most people simply take for granted that they are simply an unavoidable part of the status quo. McArthur and Carroll, however, do not. They are convinced that they could take action to “turn those individual moments of frustration into opportunities for positive change,” and constructed a simple, elegant solution for doing exactly that. By using the button you’ll help show the impact of this problem, drive awareness of the issue, and help change the system. Furthermore, the Open Access Button has several ways of helping you get access to the research you need right now

The OA Button does two things: First, it instantly records rich information about your experience – the article wanted to access,  the reason for wanting to access it,  location of requester – and second, help  to find a free, author-deposited version of the article using Google Scholar. Each time a user encounters a paywall, he simply clicks the button in his bookmark bar, fills out an optional dialogue box, and his experience is added to a map alongside other users.  Then, the user receives a link to search for freeaccess to the article using resources such as Google Scholar. The Open AccessButton initiative generates  a worldwide map showing the impact of denied access to research in a sort of storytelling by users visible by a map interactive.

More information: http://oabutton.wordpress.com/