What the programme is

Cultural Heritage Online is an independent journalistic publication (ISSN 3144-1866), an editorial project begun in 1998 and online without interruption since 2001. Its archive documents more than 17,150 places in 6,400 cities, alongside a magazine and an events calendar.

Students and teachers of architecture, conservation, archaeology, art history, history, heritage and museum studies, and landscape and urban studies already use it to find, document and compare places. CHO Academic turns that use into a working relationship: a professional account at no cost, your name on what you publish, and a path to becoming the publication’s correspondent for your country.

Two ways in

What you receive

• Operator PRO, at no cost while you study or teach. The professional account — list price $99 a year — free for as long as you study or teach at a partner institution: it runs for twelve months and is renewed at no cost with the same department code. It gives you the tools to publish places, events, articles, photographs and itineraries under your own name — and if you have written the piece yourself you can send it to us as it is — see our byline policy below. The selling tools of Operator PRO (ticketed itineraries, road-books, payouts) are not part of Academic.
• When you graduate or leave, nothing is lost. We write to you first. Everything you have published stays online under your name, at the same addresses, and your author page stays active. You can swap the institutional address on the account for a private one and keep the same account, so your whole record of contributions remains yours. When you are no longer a student or a member of faculty, the professional tools lapse and the account moves to the free level by itself, at no cost. It is set out in §3.1 of our Terms, not just here.
• Your own author page. Every contribution you publish is listed, with its date, at a permanent address under your name. The page shows your portrait, your bio, a link to your own site, to your LinkedIn profile and to your ORCID if you add them — your ORCID is declared in the page data too, so that search engines and repositories can tell that the author of these pages is you — and a contact form that never displays your email address — you can switch that form off from your profile.
• The correspondent track. Contributors who report regularly from their country can be named CHO Correspondent for that country: listed on the masthead, and able to ask the publisher for a letter of accreditation for the events they cover. There is one correspondent per country, chosen by the editors on what has been published and on sustained engagement, and the role is reviewed every year. At the end of each year the editors publish the correspondents of the year.

What it can do for your record — and what it cannot

What you publish here is public, dated, edited and indexed by search engines. Over time your author page becomes a verifiable record of fieldwork, writing and documentation. You can link it from your CV, your portfolio and the publications section of your LinkedIn profile, and a supervisor, an employer or an admissions committee can check it in one click.

What it is not, said plainly: this is not peer-reviewed publication. What you publish here is edited and fact-checked, and it carries our ISSN (3144-1866) and, for articles and research notes, a DOI, so it can be cited — but it is not a peer-reviewed article in an indexed journal, and it does not count as one towards a doctorate, a national qualification or a competitive post. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. Where it may count is under public engagement and third-mission activity, which many universities assess and report separately: that is worth asking your research office, and we will provide whatever documentation it needs.

Beyond that, we do not offer jobs, placements, introductions to employers, or any promise that your work will be noticed. The record is yours to use.

Who writes what: our byline policy

We state this plainly because many universities have rules on authorship and on the use of AI, and your publication record should be one you can defend in front of any of them.

• If you write the piece yourself, it runs under your name alone. The editors edit it; they do not rewrite it. The credit reads By <your name>. Where you ask us to publish your text exactly as you wrote it, we do, and the page says that no AI tool was used on it.
• If you supply the material and the desk writes it up, the credit says so: Reported by <your name> · Written with the CHO editorial desk. «The material» means the subject, the visit, the photographs, the notes and the sources. The editorial desk uses AI tools for research, first drafts and translation, under human editorial review, exactly as our Editorial Guidelines state.

Either way, nothing carrying your name is published until you have read it in full and approved it, and the reporting credit is yours: you chose the subject and supplied the material.

What we ask of the institution

One thing: tell your students and staff that the programme exists — a notice on the department’s website, newsletter or notice board, with a link to this page. Access is granted on the institutional email address, so the announcement is also the proof of eligibility. Nothing is signed, nothing is paid, and the institution takes on no obligation towards us.

What the institution receives: a media partner

In return, a partner institution gets its own page on the publication — logo, presentation and a link to its website, to the home page or to the page it prefers — and a place in the directory of partner institutions, by field and by country. Its public events — lectures, exhibitions, open days, conferences — are published in our events calendar under its name, and the editors may cover them in the magazine.

The institution sends the poster, two photographs and the essentials. The text is drafted by Sofia, our AI-assisted editorial desk, and reviewed by a human editor; we send back a preview, and nothing is published until the institution says yes.

Separately from the programme, our archive already documents the buildings many of these schools work in — a UNESCO castle in Turin, a Cistercian abbey in Brussels, the rooms the Royal Academy left in London. Those pages exist whether or not an institution joins us: see the seats we document.

How a correspondent works

• You choose the subject and gather the material. A building, an exhibition opening, a restoration site, a fair: you go, you photograph, you take notes, you collect the documents and the names.
• You write it, or the desk writes it up with you. The credit is set out in the byline policy above, and it says which of the two happened.
• It is published, checked and answered for. Every piece runs under the Editorial Guidelines and the Corrections Policy; the editor & publisher answers for what the publication prints, and your credit travels with the piece.

The letter of accreditation

• A correspondent who needs press access to a named event — a fair, a vernissage, an opening, an exhibition preview — can ask the publisher for a letter of accreditation. It is a signed letter on the publication’s letterhead stating that you report for Cultural Heritage Online, naming the event, and requesting press access on the publication’s behalf. It is issued for one event at a time.
• What it is not, said plainly: it is not a press card, not a professional title and not a journalistic qualification under any national law. Whether to grant access is always the organiser’s decision. If you want a card recognised in its own right, the writer track explains how three published bylines here support an application to a freelance press-card scheme (NWU, IFJ) — a card you apply for yourself and that stays yours.

Photographs, rights and responsible documentation

• Your rights. You keep the copyright of your text and your photographs. By publishing here you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to publish and archive them with your credit, and you remain free to use them anywhere else — §7.2 of our Terms.
• Your sources. Everything you publish must be your own documentation, or openly licensed material with its credit. Photographs of other people’s work are credited to their authors, and the editors may decline anything that cannot be verified.
• Images of cultural property. Some countries restrict how images of public cultural property may be published: in Italy, publishing images of state-owned cultural property in a commercial publication can require authorisation and a fee, and several European countries limit freedom of panorama for recent architecture and public art. Tell us where a photograph was taken and we check before publishing.
• Archaeology. Unpublished excavation data belongs to the excavation director or the concession holder, and is not published here without their consent. For sites that are not guarded, we do not publish precise coordinates.

Your data

Your author page carries the name you set in your profile, and its contact form never displays your email address — you can switch the form off yourself. You can ask the editors to hide the page or to remove your personal data at any time, by writing to [email protected]: your name and profile are then deleted, and the pieces you published are either withdrawn or kept without your name, as you prefer. The full account is in our Privacy Policy.

Who can receive Academic access

• Students and teaching staff of a partner department, writing from any address. The department gives you a code; the code is the proof. Universities outside the United States mostly sit on an ordinary national domain, and doctoral candidates between contracts often have no working university mailbox at all. We are not going to shut those people out over an address.
• Eighteen or older, in one of seven fields: architecture, conservation and restoration, archaeology, art history, history, heritage and museum studies, landscape and urban studies. You confirm your age when you enter the code. We do not ask for your date of birth and we do not keep one.
• Contributions are voluntary and unpaid, and do not create an employment or internship relationship. If your institution wishes to recognise them for academic credit or as a placement, write to us and we provide whatever documentation it needs.

Activate your access with your department code

Once your free account exists, this is the whole of it: paste the code your department
published, tick the box that says you are eighteen, and your Academic access is on for twelve
months. When the year is up, the same code renews it, for as long as you are still a student or
teach there. No documents, no scans of a student card, nothing to pay. A few departments ask us
to check requests that arrive from outside their own domain; if yours is one of them, the page
says so when you send the code and an editor confirms within two working days. If you have no
code, write to us and we will ask the department for one.

Create your free account first, then come back to this page to enter your department code.

CHO Correspondent is a designation within this publication, assigned and withdrawn by its editors; it is not an official title, a licence or a press credential, and it confers no rights towards third parties. The programme is operated by OASIS Tech LLC, publisher of Cultural Heritage Online. See the Masthead, the Editorial Guidelines, the Corrections Policy and the Privacy Policy, which apply to every byline including yours.