13 December 2021
STM (the Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers) has today announced the launch of a demonstrator implementation for its Article Sharing Framework (ASF). The ASF leverages existing industry technologies and infrastructures to enable content sharing in ways that are simple, seamless and consistent with publisher’s policies and legal frameworks. The ASF therefore supports platforms to comply with the 2019/790 EU directive which deals with copyright in the Digital Single Market.
Developed by STM Solutions, the operational arm of STM, and in close collaboration with STM’s ASF Working Group, the newly launched demonstrator enables platforms to use the ASF and start developing and testing integrations using real-life data delivered by participating publishers, thus allowing platforms to determine in real-time whether journal articles can be legally shared.
The ASF enables platforms to make sharing decisions in real-time utilising metadata that is embedded within the content by publishers and made available via an application programming interface (API). With a full implementation by Crossref expected in 2022, the demonstrator released today showcases the value and applicability of the ASF. The demonstrator is based on real-life ASF license information from several publishers covering over hundred thousand recently published journal articles.
Speaking of the launch of the ASF Demonstrator, Jim Milne, President of ACS Publications said “This is a wonderful next step for enabling the responsible sharing of published scientific articles. The Article Sharing Framework encourages publishers and platforms to collaborate to enable sharing that is in keeping with publisher policies.” Crossref has been heavily involved in designing the ASF to be a workable solution for all and its Director of Product, Bryan Vickery, commented: “Crossref has 16,000 members in 146 countries and is always happy to support efforts to accommodate additional metadata that helps makes research objects easy to find, cite, link, assess, and reuse.”
Hylke Koers, Chief Information Officer for STM Solutions, added: “I am extremely pleased that STM Solutions has been able to help accelerate this initiative which is of great value to publishers and the scholarly communications community as a whole.”
More information and technical specifications can be found online at https://www.stm-assoc.org/stm-solutions/asf-demonstrator.