A Word From The Writing Team (October 2018)

This issue includes: Writing Lessons from Ted-Ed WHYY\u27s Maiken Scott on Communicating Science Paywall: The Business of Scholarshi

Vägen till väggen En studie om betalväggar på den svenska dagstidningsmarknaden

Abstract During the last decades, the Swedish newspaper industry has seen a decline in circulation and ad revenues. Most of the Swedish daily newspapers are present online, and has been since the middle of the 1990s. The general situation has been that the news offered online are free to read, and as a result, daily newspapers have relied on ad revenues to fund their presence online. With the rise of major players on the online ad market, such as Google and Facebook, the newspapers in Sweden have been faced with a new problem when it comes to making their online presence profitable. A solution to the problem, brought forth by the daily newspapers, has been to implement paywalls on their online news sites. This study examines the general situation for Swedish daily newspapers when it comes to paywalls. By using a quantitative method, the study examines the occurrence of paywalls on Swedish daily newspapers, as well as examining what kind of paywalls the Swedish daily newspapers use. Furthermore, the study tries to seek out the incentives that the Swedish daily newspapers have when it comes to implementing a paywall, as well as examining the reasons for choosing a specific type of paywall. This is done by using a qualitative method in the form of semi structured interviews with representatives from five Swedish media groups. Our study shows that around two thirds of the Swedish daily newspapers already have some kind of paywall implemented on their online news sites, and that the most common type of paywall is the soft paywall. The results from our study also show that the type of paywall that an online newspaper uses, seem to be dependent on what news group the newspaper is a part of, and if one publication in a newsgroup uses a certain type of paywall, the rest of the publications in the news group are likely to use the same type. Furthermore, the study shows that several of the daily newspapers without some form of paywall, are going to be implementing one in the near future. The main reason for implementing a paywall seems to be a general opinion amongst the media groups, which argues that the newspapers need more than just one source of revenue in order for them to be financially viable. Keywords: Paywall, Swedish newspapers, Digital revenue, Digital subscriptions, Online news, Paid conten

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship (Promotional Flyer)

Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary which focuses on the need for open access to research and science, questions the rationale behind the $25.2 billion a year that flows into for-profit academic publishers, examines the 35-40% profit margin associated with the top academic publisher Elsevier and looks at how that profit margin is often greater than some of the most profitable tech companies like Apple, Facebook and Google. Staying true to the open access model: it is free to stream and download, for private or public use, and maintains the most open CC BY 4.0 Creative Commons designation to ensure anyone regardless of their social, financial or political background will have access

Startups for journalists: the news hub

News Must Be Free Post by William Stolerman Imagine you’re launching a news platform. Imagine you’ve got the chance to design the platform from scratch. Imagine print had never existed. Imagine the digital age was the only one you’d ever known. Would you charge users for access? The answer should be ‘no’.The problem, as shown by Matter, a long-form journalism platform that raised nearly three times its funding goal on Kickstarter and had to drop its paywall last year, is that even if you’ve got plenty of vocal supporters for your theoretical paywall, turning that support into hard cash is extremely challenging. In fact, it’s nigh on impossible for a mainstream news platform to enter the market and charge for access, which means any new blood will (and should) be free. The next big thing in news isn’t going to be hiding behind a paywall

Build Your Resume and Leave an Impact: Publish in The Cupola

The Cupola actively serves as a resistance to the academic publishing system that makes knowledge exclusive to the wealthy and privileged who have the ability to access it. Instead of keeping scholarship “behind the paywall” with high subscription costs, The Cupola and the other open repositories keep the knowledge freely accessible to everyone at any time, anywhere in the world. The Cupola has only existed since April 2012, but we have already reached 1 million downloads (...) To find out more about how The Cupola is perceived on the campus and how to make more students interested in student nominations, I talked to professors, current students and alumni from Gettysburg College. We discussed the issues of representation in writing and publishing and the role of The Cupola in comparison. Thus, this article is a collection of various accounts on the importance of student scholarship and a collection of advice on how to use The Cupola to your benefit. [excerpt

Is an institutional repository right for your small college library?

Learn how a small college library launched an institutional repository (IR) without dedicated staff or IT support. Thanks to hosted solutions and our global learning community, open access repositories are now within reach of smaller institutions, and they bring many benefits to the libraries that manage them. Weigh the benefits of library publishing with the new, lower cost of participating, and decide if an IR is right for your library

The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles

Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles. We use three samples, each of 100,000 articles, to investigateOAin three populations: (1) all journal articles assigned a Crossref DOI, (2) recent journal articles indexed in Web of Science, and (3) articles viewed by users of Unpaywall, an open-source browser extension that lets users find OA articles using oaDOI. We estimate that at least 28% of the scholarly literature is OA (19M in total) and that this proportion is growing, driven particularly by growth in Gold and Hybrid. The most recent year analyzed (2015) also has the highest percentage of OA (45%). Because of this growth, and the fact that readers disproportionately access newer articles, we find that Unpaywall users encounter OA quite frequently: 47% of articles they view are OA. Notably, the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made freeto- read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license. We also examine the citation impact of OA articles, corroborating the so-called open-access citation advantage: accounting for age and discipline, OA articles receive 18% more citations than average, an effect driven primarily by Green and Hybrid OA.Weencourage further research using the free oaDOI service, as a way to inform OA policy and practice