Open Access Button project: updates, prototypes, next steps | Mozilla Science Lab

"We’ve been hacking on the Open Access Button for the last few months (which we first wrote about here) with the help of our colleague Victor Ng, a services engineer at Mozilla. At the Science Lab, we’re keen to see how we can move science forward by building and extending existing open tools and projects on the web, and Victor’s work with the Open Access Button is doing just that. We’ve been busy working to turn the tool from a means of flagging that you’ve hit a paywall to one that can help increase discoverability of Open Access content on the web. In the post below, Victor writes of where we’ve come with the project, what issues remain, and how you can get involved. === We’ve quietly released a new release. There’s a bunch of smaller bits we’ve added to round out some long standing bugs. A few big changes since we last wrote about the project: 1. We properly send out confirmation emails with a link that you can click on to verify your email address. 2. Bookmarklets that are associated with a verified email address will now have the option of notifying authors that access to their paper was denied because of a paywall. For authors – this happens once and only once per paper per publisher. 3. Authors can now submit links to open access versions of their documents. When subsequent users try to access the paper through the paywall – the open access button will provide the link to the open access version of the paper."