NYT and linkrot
Blogosphere abuzz with rumours that The New York Times (registration required) is changing its archival policy. The suggestion is that links more than 30 days old would redirect to a page requesting that you buy the article for $2.95.
Reaction to the decision has been swift. The end of the Times as a source of links is the forecast. Why should anyone link to pages that no one would be able to see after 30 days? Indeed. Bloggers will think twice before telling people about something interesting if their visitors then have to pony up three dollars to read it. And what would said visitors get for their money? A look at the article (without pictures or graphs) for 90 days. Then they?ll have to pay again.
Interestingly, many scientific journals are heading in the opposite direction. You subscribe to read the current issue but the work is then opened to everyone after a period of time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, allows open access to anything six months older or more. So, it makes sense to subscribe. You get access to six months of content at a reasonable price, and if you do not want to buy a subscription you can access all the articles on the site for seven days for $15.
Diarist of the day: Stephen Spender, 9 April 1980"Left Vancouver 7 April. At Seattle Airport the man at the desk asked, when to pay the bill I produced my credit card, whether I was related to the poet Stephen Spender. So I said, 'That's me.' He looked pleased and said, 'Gee, a near-celebrity.' "
Comments
What uncanny prescience: a "NEAR-celebrity"... Was Stephen Spender one of those Evelyn Waugh wrote of as escapists in 'Put Out More Flags'?
Posted by: bluKat | April 10, 2003 4:09 AM
For much the same reason, after a promising start the Times was leapfrogged by both the Guardian and The Telegraph as the on-line UK papers of record.
We have a strict policy against linking to Times articles on Samizdata.net because the links rot for overseas readers. Give that overseas on-line readers are far less likely to have potentially purchased a hard copy than a domestic UK reader (for whom the links do *not* rot as quickly), the newspaper's policy is utterly inexplicable to me... perhaps I am missing something but I am baffled why they do that.
Posted by: Perry de Havilland | April 16, 2003 7:42 AM