Article Sharing Framework: Facilitating Scholarly Sharing Through Metadata - The Scholarly Kitchen

"In the European Union, an initiative to address this issue was finalized in a 2019 change to the EU Copyright Directive, the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (official text here). That new law took effect in June 2019 and must be translated into national law by EU Member States by June 2021. SCNs — some of which qualify as Online Content Sharing Service Providers, or OCSSPs as they are referred to in the Directive — fall within the scope of the new rules and, thus, are required to follow certain steps and obligations if they want to preserve the possibility avoiding liability for copyright infringement under the Directive. In particular, OCSSPs have to make “best efforts to ensure the unavailability” of protected works for which rightsholders have provided “relevant and necessary information”. In other words, in order for platforms to meet their obligation, publishers themselves have an obligation to give information, regarding rights and permissions of content sharing, in a method that can be feasibly leveraged at scale by SCNs....

In order to address this challenge, a team under the STM Association’s, STEC Committee, developed the Article Sharing Framework. The Framework gives scholarly publishers a mechanism to provide SCNs — in machine-actionable form — information about an article’s PDF’s identity and the respective publisher’s sharing policies. This enables SCNs to use the information to determine in an automated way, and in real-time, whether the publisher’s content may be shared...."