In recent years, many media outlets have joined publications like the WSJ and NY Times in erecting paywalls around their online offerings, giving visitors access to a few articles a month before asking them to pay for unlimited access. Due to the continuing worldwide COVID-19/coronavirus crisis and in order to make information about the pandemic more accessible to the public, several publications have dropped their paywalls specifically for their coronavirus coverage (thanks to everyone who responded to my tweet about this).
Among them are The Atlantic, WSJ, Talking Points Memo, Globe and Mail, Seattle Times, Miami Herald (and other McClatchy-owned properties), Toronto Star, Stat, Dallas Morning News, Medium, NY Times, and several medical/science journals. Notably, The Guardian relies on online subscription revenue but doesn’t put anything behind a paywall, including their coronavirus coverage.
In addition, a group of archivists have created an online directory of scientific papers related to coronaviruses, available for free download.
“These articles were always written to be shared with as many people as possible,” Reddit user “shrine,” an organizer of the archive, said in a call. “From every angle that you look at it, [paywalled research] is an immoral situation, and it’s an ongoing tragedy.”
Kudos to those media organizations for doing the right thing — this information can save people’s lives. Let’s hope others (*cough* Washington Post) will soon follow suit. And if you find the coverage helpful, subscribe to these outlets!
BTW, like The Guardian, kottke.org is supported by readers just like you who contribute to make sure that every single thing on the site is accessible to everyone. If you’re a regular reader, please consider supporting this experiment in openness.
Update: Added the NY Times to the list above. I am also hearing that many European papers are not dropping their paywalls in the face of the crisis.