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Archive for March, 2010
The Times Reveals New Charges for Online Access
Mar 26th
The Times and The Sunday Times today announced the charges for access to online news content that will apply from June.
The cost will be £1 a day (the same as the print edition), or £2 for one week’s subscription. Paid customers will get access to both sites and ’seven day subscriptions’ to the print editions will include web access for free.
Two new websites www.thetimes.co.uk and www.thesundaytimes.co.uk will launch in early May, replacing Times Online, the current combined site. This is the first time the two papers have separated their online entities. The new sites will be available for a free trial period to registered customers before the paywall is erected in June.
Rebekah Brooks, Chief Executive of News International said that tabloid titles The Sun and News of the World would follow behind the paywall but did not specify when.
John Witherow, Editor of The Sunday Times, promised ”new digital features to enhance our coverage and encourage interactivity” and compared the £2 a week charge to “the price of a cup of coffee”. Whether readers will think this is an investment worth making in the face of free news content available elsewhere remains to be seen.
British Library Announces UK Web Archive
Mar 23rd
The British Library recently announced the launch of the UK Web Archive, which will store and make accessible every site in the .uk top-level domain. The project will deploy an impressive array of text-mining and analysis software - Avi Rappoport reveals the details in Information Today’s Newsbreaks.
Interview with Stevan Harnad – 2010 the Tipping Point for Universal Open Access?
Mar 23rd
Open access advocate Stevan Harnad looks back over the progress made by the OA movement to date, in a detailed and far-reaching interview with Richard Poynder for Information Today. Harnad speculates as to whether 2010 will see the tipping point needed to usher in universal open access, with the aim of getting the 2.5 million articles a year that are published in 25,000 peer-reviewed journals all freely available online.
Harnad is realistic in his assessment of the progress made to date: “…the history of OA so far has been one of gratuitous over-reaching that has not only netted little, but it has failed even to grasp what has already been well within reach for some time: free online access to refereed reseach.” But he is cautiously optimisitic about the initiatives underway in 2010.
