Elsevier’s New Share Link: Sharing Full-Text of New Publications for Greater Visibility

Are you publishing research in an Elsevier journal? If so, jumpstart the dissemination of your newly published article by sharing it with colleagues through e-mail or by posting it on social media—all with permission from Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers. In a new twist, Elsevier is now encouraging authors to share newly published articles, but under the terms of Elsevier’s new Share Link service.

Share Link automatically sends a special Web link to the corresponding author at the final publication stage, who can then distribute the link to co-authors. Authors can use Share Link for the first 50 days to provide full-text access (HTML or PDF) by e-mail or by posting on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Mendeley, or other personal social media. No registration is required to access the article for anyone clicking on the special Share Link during the 50-day sharing period.

Why is Elsevier doing this? Authors sharing new publications within their professional and personal networks through a variety of digital tools may increase exposure of new publications, benefitting both author and publisher: as an article becomes more visible, the potential for citations increases, positively impacting both article-level and journal metrics.

Only journals managed within the Elsevier Production Tracking System (PTS) are included in the Share Link program. (The Lancet, and some other third-party owned journals, operate outside of the PTS.) A list of all Elsevier journal titles can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/journals/title/a.

For more information about authors’ rights, visit the HSLS Scholarly Communication LibGuide, or contact Andrea Ketchum at ketchum@pitt.edu.

~Andrea Ketchum