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The Open Access Button no longer exists. Its own site now shows a single notice: “As of November 18th 2025, the Open Access Button is no longer available.” The nonprofit that ran it, OA.Works, sunset it alongside its sister tool InstantILL the same day — announced in an OA.Works blog post on October 8, 2025 — and points former users toward Unpaywall as the closest replacement. If you landed here because the extension stopped responding or a bookmarklet you’ve used for years suddenly does nothing, that is why: nothing is broken on your end, the service is gone. This guide covers what the Open Access Button actually searched for legal full text, the one thing it did that Unpaywall does not, and where to send that same search now.
What the Open Access Button Searched For
Open Access Button was built by David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, launching in beta on November 18, 2013 — so its 2025 sunset landed exactly twelve years after its launch date, which was evidently a deliberate close rather than an abrupt one. It was a browser extension and bookmarklet: point it at a paywalled article and it searched for a legal, free-to-read copy of that specific work rather than a substitute source.
Like the tools that inherited its territory, it was not searching one index. It checked green open-access repositories — the subject repositories (arXiv, PubMed Central and similar) and institutional repositories where authors deposit accepted manuscripts under a publisher’s self-archiving policy — as well as gold open-access and hybrid-journal copies hosted directly by the publisher, and general web locations where an author had posted a copy on a personal or lab page.
The One Thing It Did That an Automated Lookup Doesn’t
This is the actual difference worth understanding, not just a historical footnote. Every tool in this space, past and present, does the automated part the same way in outline: check a DOI or URL against known OA locations and hand back a link if one exists. Open Access Button’s distinguishing feature was what happened when that automated check came back empty. Rather than simply reporting “no free copy found,” it offered a request workflow: the reader could submit a request for the specific article, which routed toward the corresponding author with an ask to deposit or share a copy. It was, in effect, a lightweight, purpose-built version of emailing the author yourself — formalized into a button, with the request logged rather than sent from your own inbox.
That request mechanism is the piece that has no direct automated successor. Unpaywall, InstantILL and every comparable current tool are lookup services: they tell you whether a legal copy already exists somewhere findable. None of them contact an author on your behalf when the answer is no. If the automated check comes back empty today, the request step Open Access Button used to handle for you is a manual step again — you find the corresponding author’s email (from the paper itself, or an ORCID record) and ask directly.
What It Could Never Find, Even Running
Worth being precise about this, because it did not change with the sunset — these were always outside what any legal full-text finder can do, Open Access Button included. It could not surface a subscription copy you don’t have rights to, because that would not be legal. It could not find a copy that genuinely does not exist anywhere open — some articles, especially older ones or ones under strict publisher embargoes with no compliant deposit, simply have no free legal version, and no request always got a reply. And it could not do anything for content with no DOI or stable identifier to check against, which is part of why it worked from a URL as a fallback rather than a DOI alone.
How Unpaywall Differs, Concretely
Unpaywall, built and run by the nonprofit OurResearch (a separate organization from OA.Works), works from the same starting question — is there a legal free copy of this specific article — but answers it differently in two ways that matter if you used Open Access Button regularly:
- It is a standing database, not a per-click search. Unpaywall continuously harvests OA signals from publisher sites, DOAJ-indexed journals, and repositories, and keeps that index current on an ongoing basis. Open Access Button ran its check at the moment you clicked. In practice this means Unpaywall can be faster for articles it already has indexed, while a fresh preprint deposited an hour ago is exactly the kind of thing a live check was sometimes better positioned to catch.
- It has no request-a-copy step. As above — Unpaywall reports what it can already find and stops there. It does not email authors, and there is no logged request to fall back on if the automated answer is no.
Unpaywall is also distributed more ways than Open Access Button was: a browser extension, a full REST API keyed by DOI, and periodic database snapshots, which is why it is now embedded inside reference managers, library discovery layers and tools like EndNote Click rather than used only as a standalone click-through.
The Legal Full-Text Routes to Use Now
With the request-a-copy step gone, finding a legal copy is back to a short, ordered checklist rather than one click:
- Run the Unpaywall check first. Install the Unpaywall extension or check the DOI through its API. This catches the same green/gold/hybrid copies Open Access Button used to find, and it is the closest one-step replacement that still exists.
- Search the author’s institutional repository directly. Most universities require or encourage deposit of the accepted manuscript; searching the author’s institution’s repository by title, even when Unpaywall hasn’t indexed that specific copy yet, sometimes surfaces it faster. See what an institutional repository is and how deposit works.
- Check the relevant subject repository or preprint server. For fields with an established preprint culture, the accepted or even a near-final version is often on arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv or a discipline equivalent well before or alongside formal publication — see our preprint servers guide for which server covers which field.
- Email the corresponding author. This is the step Open Access Button used to formalize. Most journal articles list a corresponding author’s email, and ORCID records often carry a current one when the paper’s own listing is stale. A short, specific request for the accepted manuscript is normal practice and most authors are glad to send one.
- Fall back to your library. If you have institutional access, a link resolver or interlibrary loan request remains the legal route to a subscription copy you’re entitled to but can’t immediately reach — interlibrary loan requests increasingly run over the ISO 18626 protocol between library systems.
None of this restores the single-click convenience Open Access Button offered at its best. It does cover the same ground the button used to cover, in the order that is fastest for most articles.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Open Access Button still available in any form?
No. Its own site states plainly that as of November 18, 2025 it is no longer available, and it directs former users to Unpaywall. There is no successor product carrying the Open Access Button name.
What happened to InstantILL?
InstantILL, OA.Works’ other product for routing readers to a legal copy or interlibrary loan, was sunset the same day as Open Access Button. Existing installations stopped working.
Does Unpaywall email authors to request a copy, like Open Access Button did?
No. Unpaywall is a lookup-only service: it reports whether a legal copy already exists in its index. It has no request-a-copy workflow, so that step is manual again if the automated check comes back empty.
Why did Open Access Button and InstantILL shut down?
OA.Works announced the sunset in an October 8, 2025 blog post, effective November 18, 2025. OA.Works continues to run other tools (ShareYourPaper, OA.Report, OA.Support); the specific rationale for retiring these two products specifically was not detailed in the material we could verify, so we report the fact of the sunset without speculating on the reasoning beyond what OA.Works itself has published.
Is there any legal way to get a subscription-only article for free?
Not through an OA-status lookup tool — those only ever surfaced copies the rightsholder had already made legally free somewhere. For a subscription article with no open copy, the legal routes are an institutional subscription, interlibrary loan, or a direct request to the author for their accepted manuscript.
For more on the tools researchers use to find and manage the literature, see the research tools hub, our guide to EndNote Click, and how Unpaywall works.
