Getting a scholarly article published is a satisfying and exciting end point for research teams who likely spent months or even years carrying out their research projects. Journal publishers are key partners in helping researchers get the results of this work out and into the scientific record. Regardless of whether the journal is open access (where authors generally hold onto the article copyrights) or follows a more traditional publishing model (where a copyright transfer to the publisher occurs as part of the submission process), all publishers are eager to help their authors get the word out about the research once the paper is published.
Sharing their article, however, can sometimes get a bit complicated for authors as the sharing landscape is somewhat unclear with different journal publishers often having different copyright-related restrictions in place. In comes How Can I Share It, a website developed by a number of scholarly publishing organizations that “have agreed to work together to develop and continually improve the information, resources and tools on this site to facilitate sharing, which benefits researchers, institutions, and society as a whole.” Researchers simply need to plug in an article DOI to bring up article-specific guidance; the advice will vary depending on whether the researcher is a co-author or not.
From: https://www.howcanishareit.com/about-us
“The Can I Share It look-up tool provides academic researchers with an easy way to check where a journal article can be shared in line with the paper’s access and usage rights.“
“How Can I share It also includes information on how you can share, where you can share and recommendations for sharing sites where you can engage and collaborate with the research community. How Can I Share It endorses the voluntary principles for article sharing on scholarly collaboration networks as drafted by the STM Association.”
In the DOI search results are listed resources and tools where an author can share, organized in four categories, including: tools where…
1) “You can share the metadata and abstract as well as a link to the article on the respective publishers’ platforms on”
2) “You can share your author’s original (preprint) on”
3) “You can share the accepted manuscript on”
4) “You can share the version of record on”
