ecancermedicalscience asked Joseph Mcarthur and the Open Access Button team about their plans for expanding their services and advocacy.

The Open Access Button is a web and mobile app that helps students, researchers, patients and the public get access to academic research.

People use research articles to learn, advance scientific understanding, understand the world around them, and fuel the economy. However, with the costs of accessing individual articles reaching £30 or more, many people can be priced out of accessing research.

The Open Access Button was developed to connect people to open research and advocate for Open Access, which is the free online access to research articles with full reuse rights.

In November 2013 they launched a "Beta" version, recording over 12,000 instances of people without access to research articles. Then in 2014 the team expanded the Open Access Button, developing a mobile app through funding from the JISC Summer of Student Innovation.

Now they're seeking to increase the benefits of the Open Access Button by adding a much requested feature to automatically email an author feature when a copy of the research isn’t publicly available - and they're hoping for the community's help.

The Open Access Button is competing for £20,000 in funding from the JISC Supporting Startup Projects. This funding would support the development of the feature allowing users to generate automatic emails asking an author to make their paper available through a repository.

Emailing authors directly has long been used as a tactic to request copies of papers behind paywalls. This new feature will allow users to engage with authors in a familiar way, increase compliance while not duplicating university services, and provide simple advice to authors on depositing in existing repositories.

If the article is deposited, then the requesting user(s) would be made aware that it has become accessible. Additionally, this feature allows the OA Button Team to promote historical archiving of previously published research which extends past policy changes that only affect newly published articles.

Readers can support the Open Access Button and the development of this new feature by submitting their vote here.

JISC funding will primarily provide development and testing of the new feature, as well as travel and promotional expenses to ensure consultation, feedback and promotion. Additional support during the "Startup period" will assist long term planning to embed within universities and become sustainable.

"We also hope to attract more users to the Open Access Button with this new feature," the team told ecancer.

"The qualitative and quantitative data generated can support efforts by Open Access advocates to improve the scholarly publishing system in the future."

Visit the JISC Supporting Startup Projects page to support the Open Access Button.

Voting ends on Monday, 25 May.

To get your own Open Access Button or find out more, visit www.openaccessbutton.org. Tweet @OA_Button or email hello@openaccessbutton.org if you have any questions or would like to collaborate.

ecancermedicalscience, an open-access biomedical journal, advocates public access to research articles.