The following is a guest post by Victor Ng, a services engineer at Mozilla, on his work with a project called the “Open Access Button”. 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. Separate from his work at Mozilla, he became interested in the open science space after being diagnosed with a rare medical condition, quickly becoming frustrated by his inability to access scholarly literature needed for him to understand his condition. Here’s his story of his work taking an open source project and adapting it to help enable others better access to content on the web. You can follow his on Twitter at @crankycoder or check out his blog for more.

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The Open Access Button

The Open Access button project started in June 2013 to help people see who was being denied access to scientific publications because of paywalls. The idea was simple: every day, people who are looking for important scientific information can’t get it because there’s no publicly-available version. Instead, the search for an article ends all too often in a paywall, even if the work itself was paid for by public money.

With OAButton, a person runs into a paywall can report the problem by clicking on the bookmarklet. The OAButton then tries to find relevant papers, and also collects information from the user so that we map how often this frustration is happening globally. By making the problem visible (see image above), we wanted to spark a discussion about how to give the general public better access to cutting-edge research. We also wanted to show that this isn’t just an academic problem.

The clusters above are people looking for medical research for themselves, or their friends and family. They’re students looking for research when they are in school, parents concerned about pollution, or simply people who are curious and would like to learn more. In all those cases, there is no obvious way for them to find the information they want.

Today’s OAButton a good start. But we can do better. Although the final copy of a paper may not be available, there are many other places where draft or preprint copies of the paper can be found. Sites like arxiv.org house hundreds of thousands of preprints, and at many institutions like Harvard, there is a mandate to self-archive the final version of a paper into an university repository. Perhaps most importantly, many universities have ‘green’ open access policies where researchers may distribute freely their manuscripts and published works with their colleagues, separate from the journal.

Right now, there is no fabric that connects all these pieces together. I’ve therefore started on a little hack on top of the OAButton to do so.

Every paper that is published is associated with a unique digital object identifier, or DOI. Every DOI is also associated with a webpage, and that page contains an author email address. My hack allows authors to email the OAButton with a DOI and a URL to a publicly available version of their paper. This may be a link to the library where the paper has been self-deposited, or a direct link to the author’s own personal copy of the paper.

The next time a person goes to access the blocked paper, the OAButton can display the author-submitted version of the paper. This gets more science into more people’s hands, and gives authors more readers than they’d otherwise have. It’s a win for everyone.

My hack isn’t complete: we need some help to get it finished, and even more than that, feedback on how we can use the OAButton to open up science a little more. You can follow along and hack with us here in the Mozilla Science repository, or get in touch with the Science Lab directly.

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Victor will be joining us on our next community call on January 9 (call in details, here). Join us to hear more about this work, ask questions find out how you can get involved. We’d love to hear your thoughts. Have a question? Add it to the etherpad!