© 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature. This article reports on a very recent proposal for a new type of process-independent QCD effective charge (Binosi et al. in Phys Rev D 96(5):054026, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.96.054026) defined, as an anologue of the Gell-Mann-Low effective charge in QCD, on the ground of nothing but the knowledge of the gauge-field two-point Green’s function, albeit modified within a particular computational framework; namely, the combination of pinch technique and background field method which makes possible a systematic rearranging of classes of diagrams in order to redefine the Green’s function and have them obey linear QED-like Slavnov–Taylor identities. We have here calculated that effective charge, shown how strikingly well it compares to a process-dependent effective charge based on the Bjorken sum rule; and, finally, employed it in an exploratory calculation of the proton electromagnetic form factor in the hard scattering regime.