Following Year-long Evaluation, AAAS Launches Metered Paywall for Access to Award-Winning News from Science

WASHINGTON, June 27, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Following a nearly year-long evaluation of readers' responses to metered access to content from Science's award-winning news department, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nonprofit publisher of the journal Science, will officially launch a metered paywall for News from Science on June 27, 2018.

Visitors to Science's news site are able to read a total of ten articles per 30-day period, free of charge, before being asked to pay a small monthly fee of $1.50 for unlimited access to the award-winning content from News from Science. AAAS members receive free unlimited access to News from Science as part of their membership.

This launch follows an experiment in metered access implemented in July of 2017 – an effort led by the AAAS Publishing office to learn more about Science's readership. During this test period, repeat visitors were asked to sign up for the newsletter and to provide limited demographic information, but no payment was requested. Throughout this evaluation, interest from readers of News from Science remained very high.

The new metered paywall applies to News from Science content posted on Science's daily news site (http://www.sciencemag.org/news). News and feature articles appearing in the print version of Science – and available online on the journal's site (http://science.sciencemag.org) – will remain exclusively available to AAAS members and individual subscribers to Science.

Each week, the news department at Science publishes approximately 30 unique, in-depth articles online, which leave practically no discipline of science or angle of inquiry unexplored. "No publication gives you a deeper or more comprehensive picture of science and how it interacts with society," said Tim Appenzeller, Science's News Editor.

Science's news site was rated the top website for science in 2017 by RealClear Science. Every year News from Science stories win several journalism awards, and the vivid graphics on the site have also won recognition. One in the 28 April 2017 special news package "Vaccine Wars," dramatizing the public health impacts of vaccines, won several prestigious awards, including from the Society for News Design.

Launch of a metered paywall approach comes as AAAS, like many media organizations today, finds itself seeking to continue to provide the excellent content for which it has been known. "Our goal is to distribute award-winning news content to as many readers as possible," said Bill Moran, Publisher, Science family of journals. "As one of the few science society publishers to offer high-quality news, it is crucial to develop a fair and low-cost opportunity for our readers to fulfill our mission: delivering smart and timely content to the global scientific community."

"AAAS's mission continues to be to communicate top-notch science broadly, and through this modest monthly fee, we are aiming to continue to support the journalists at Science who are so dedicated to aiding this pursuit," said Jeremy Berg, editor-in-chief of Science. "We believe that implementing such measures will allow the news team at Science to maintain its well-recognized high standards for reporting science."

About the American Association for the Advancement of Science

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org) as well as Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes nearly 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world. The non-profit AAAS (www.aaas.org) is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert! (www.eurekalert.org), the premier science-news Web site, a service of AAAS. See www.aaas.org.

SOURCE AAAS

Related Links

HTTP://www.aaas.org