The New York Times' online premium service TimesSelect is now available for free to anyone with an e-mail address associated with an academic institution.
The service, which provides exclusive online access to op-ed columns and the newspaper's archives, was made available Tuesday to students and others with e-mail addresses ending in ".edu," according to a Sunday report in Editor & Publisher.
"It's part of our journalistic mission to get people talking on campuses," Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com, told Editor & Publisher. "We wanted to open that up so that college students and professors can have a dialogue."
TimesSelect is already free for subscribers to the print edition of the paper and costs online-only subscribers $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year for access to opinion columns, Web exclusives, early access to Sunday Times articles and free articles from the Times' archives.
The fee-based service had approximately 627,000 subscribers as of a Feb. 21 Times press release.
