TDMRep — agent readiness

Why an agent cares

It is the mechanism EU copyright law points at for reserving text and data mining rights, so for publishers it carries legal weight the others do not. A malformed tdmrep.json reserves nothing, which is the failure mode worth catching.

Adoption

Early production. Several independent organisations run it in production, though it is still niche on the open web.

Direction of travel: ▲ rising, as at 2026-07-28.

The strongest genuine opt-out adoption: the W3C adopters register lists 30+ STM publishers plus trade publishers, hosting platforms and French newspapers, driven by EU regulation.

Adopter	Depth
Elsevier, Springer Nature, IEEE, Sage, Taylor & Francis, ACS and ~25 more	`production`
Hachette Livre, Mondadori, Penguin Random House Spain and Germany	`production`
Atypon, HighWire, Bookwire, Cairn.info, Edigita (platform opt-in)	`production`
Les Echos, Le Parisien, Ouest-France, Radio France, Sud Ouest	`production`

All of the above are recorded in the same place: github.com.

What we check

Absence is never a finding. Every check below runs only once tdmRepPresent is true, so a site that has not adopted this is not assessed on it and appears in no report. 4 of these 4 can fail it. In a Lumar crawl these land on one row per site, in the crawl-level table where itemType is access.

Check	Severity	Raises	On whose authority
`tdmRepMalformedDocument`	high	conformance, usability	specification (W3C TDMRep CG-FINAL 2024-05-10)
`tdmRepInvalidReservation`	high	conformance, usability	specification (W3C TDMRep CG-FINAL 2024-05-10)
`tdmRepMissingLocation`	medium	conformance, usability	specification (W3C TDMRep CG-FINAL 2024-05-10)
`tdmRepInvalidPolicy`	medium	conformance, usability	specification (W3C TDMRep CG-FINAL 2024-05-10)

Examples

Both of these are fixtures the test suite runs through the real collector, not snippets written for a document: the first is a shape we score as valid, the second is one we flag.

correctjsontest/e2e/test-pages/access/correct.tdmrep.json

[
  { "location": "/", "tdm-reservation": 1, "tdm-policy": "https://example.com/tdm-policy.json" },
  { "location": "/blog/", "tdm-reservation": 1 },
  { "location": "/press-releases/", "tdm-reservation": 0 }
]

present but wrongjsontest/e2e/test-pages/access/issues.tdmrep.json

[
  { "tdm-reservation": 1 },
  { "location": "/blog/", "tdm-reservation": "1" },
  { "location": "/docs/", "tdm-reservation": 1, "tdm-policy": "/policies/tdm" }
]

Specifications

Document	Revision	Kind
W3C TDM Reservation Protocol	`CG-FINAL 2024-05-10`	specification

Last re-read against the published documents: 2026-08-12.

On pinning it. CG-FINAL 2024-05-10 supersedes the 2024-02-02 second version, which is the revision most secondary write-ups still cite. It also defines HTTP header and <meta> forms of the reservation that we do not yet score.