Simple Content Sharing — consistent with publisher policies.

Together at last: STM’s Article Sharing Framework (ASF) offers us the technical processes that enable content sharing in ways that are simple and seamless, yet compliant with the EU Digital Single Market Directive. Ah, technology.

At a glance, ASF serves to:

• Enable content sharing in ways that are simple and seamless, yet consistent with publisher policies
• Provide publishers the flexibility to update sharing policies over time
• Provide platforms a means to automatically determine content sharing conditions in real-time
• Define a set of machine identifiable sharing policies, greatly simplifying implementation for both publishers and reading platforms.

Hear from others who have already implemented the ASF to get a sense of what it can offer:

“ACS decided to be an early adopter of the ASF for several reasons. Researchers and commercial content sharing platforms often seek clarity on what sharing is permitted. While Open Access articles usually convey information about allowed reuse and sharing through consistent and standard methods, a void existed for communicating similar sharing policies for other content that is not considered Open Access. Also, Article 17 of the new EU Copyright Directive provided an opportunity for ACS to make “relevant and necessary information” about sharing policies available to online platforms in an automated way. By making article sharing policy information freely available from a central repository (i.e., Crossref), multiple content sharing platforms can easily receive consistent and current sharing policy information. This, in turn, can enable researchers to have more confidence in, and spend less time on, determining where and how they can share research articles.“

— Dan O’Brien
Director of Publishing Technology
American Chemical Society
(Full testimonial here)

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“The Geological Society of London (GSL) is possibly the smallest publisher to implement support for the Article Sharing Framework (ASF). One person worked on the implementation, deferring to the management team for choosing the correct sharing policies. GSL decided to be an early adopter of the ASF for several reasons: 1. GSL had already joined How Can I Share It and this was just the next step. 2. Researchers and commercial content sharing platforms require clarity on what sharing is permitted and this seemed a good way of enabling this for content that is not considered Open Access. 3. By making article sharing policy information freely available from a central repository (i.e.,Crossref), multiple content-sharing platforms can easily receive consistent and current sharing policy information.“

— Maxine Smith
Online Development Editor
Geological Society of London
(Full testimonial here)

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“IEEE’s ASF journey has been a fruitful evolution; with a collection of concepts that was shaped by collaboration of an engaged team and guidance from STM’s STEC. IEEE’s entrance into this area was around the middle of 2019. Initially it was a wait and learn approach;
primarily to understand how other publishers were adopting ASF. “

— Bratati Biswas
Director Content Engineering & Publishing Platforms
IEEE
(Full testimonial here)