2008-10-13

New AaI&A Policy on Public (Blue) Links versus Membership (Green) Links

Visitors to the Aardenburg Imaging & Archives website have undoubtedly noticed that information available on this website is a mixture of publicly accessible and privately accessible data. Public links are colored blue whereas subscriber links are colored green. Subscription fees are helping to support the research, and they give subscribers earlier and complete access to all of the information in return. Subscription fees also entitle members to submit samples for testing, and our members' test sample contributions help to deliver a rich and varied assortment of products into testing. Members' samples are tested as time and equipment capacity permits. We test as much as we can as often as we can. Individual subscription fees are well below the true cost of testing even just one sample, so AaI&A's annual testing volume has to be balanced with the total subscription revenues and other sources of income.

AaI&A has recently implemented a new public (blue) vs membership (green) links policy that also provides a reasoned approach to paid sponsorship of the research. Hopefully, subscribing members who elect directly to sponsor some AaI&A research will help us to achieve greater public access and fund even more research, while the new policy will help us to avoid any biases or conflicts of interest.

AaI&A's new research sponsorship plan and policy for public versus membership access to the test data can be found on our "about us" web page.

Mark H. McCormick-Goodhart
Director, Aardenburg Imaging & Archives