When Would you Use this
Your are sharing a published article written by someone other than yourself via email, social media, your personal website or blog, or some other channel.
Best Practice: Share Link to Original
When sharing published articles, it is best practice to include a direct link to the original. Articles hosted on the publisher’s website are much more likely to meet digital accessibility standards (for example, supporting screen readers, keyboard navigation, headings, and image descriptions). Linking also preserves important context such as publication date, author, and updates or corrections. There are also copyright and ethical considerations. Many publishers and independent writers rely on web traffic for advertising or subscription revenue. Sharing full copies of articles instead of links can undermine that model and may create copyright risk.
Before you share the link, determine whether your audience will be able to open it (without being asked to subscribe, or pay). Some commercial publications, like Inside Higher Ed, allow unregistered users to read a certain number of free articles per month. This is probably fine. It is reasonable to assume that the majority of your audience of will not have reached the limit already. For other media outlets, individuals may be invited to create a free account with the site in order to read the article. It is best practice to avoid putting that burden on your audience.
However, if you create an account with the publication in advance, you may get access to additional options, such as the ability to share “Gift Links” with your audience so that they can bypass the paywall. For example, the New York Times allows subscribers to share 10 free gift links per months. See Framingham State University - Framingham, MA : Instructions to redeem complimentary NYTimes.com subscription.
Avoid Print-to-PDF
Sometimes articles will have a “print” button along with other “sharing” options. Or, you may be tempted to just use your browser’s print functionality to print whatever is currently open in the browser. When you do this, a print dialog opens, inviting you to choose a physical printer or else “Print to PDF.” Generally, this process creates a PDF that is not accessible – it does not include tags for headings, alt-text etc.
Some platforms may have “Save As PDF” which actually can create an appropriately-tagged PDF, but “Print to PDF” is not the same thing. Most commercial publications will not offer a functionality for “Save As PDF”/Export as PDF because it does not align with their business model.
If you must use “Print to PDF,” there are a few steps you can take to make the document more accessible. In the print dialog, you can uncheck the boxes for “Headers and Footers” and “Background Graphics”. There may be some additional settings within the print dialog that can enable meta-data to be included in the PDF, but these likely vary from system to system. If you choose to share an article in this way, please also include a link to the original which will most likely be a more accessible version, and will link the content back to its creator appropriately.
Avoid Copy and Paste
It is also not advisable to copy and paste the text of an article in your distribution channel. This practice is seen regularly on the social media site Reddit, and in personal blogs. It is acceptable to include quotations (even long ones), as long as the reader is directed back to the source via a direct link. But reproducing the text of the article in full (or nearly in full) is not advisable for many of the same reasons described above.