CHO Academic
Free professional access for students and faculty of partner institutions — and, for those who report from where they live, a named place on the masthead of an international publication.
What the programme is
Cultural Heritage Online is an independent journalistic publication (ISSN 3144-1866), online without interruption since 2001, with an archive of more than 16,800 places in 6,300 cities, a magazine, and an events calendar. Students and teachers of architecture, conservation, archaeology, art history and heritage studies already use it to find, document and compare places. CHO Academic turns that use into a working relationship: the professional account at no cost, your name on what you publish, and a path to becoming the publication’s correspondent for your country.
What you receive
- Operator PRO, free for life. The professional account — list price $99 a year — at no cost, for as long as you hold an email address at a partner institution. It gives you the tools to publish places, events, articles, photographs and itineraries under your own name. The selling tools of Operator PRO (ticketed itineraries, road-books, payouts) are not part of Academic.
- Your own author page. Every contribution you publish is listed at a permanent address under your name, with your portrait, your bio and a contact form that never shows your email. It is a verifiable publication record.
- The correspondent track. Contributors who report regularly from their country can be named CHO Correspondent for that country: listed on the masthead, with a letter of accreditation from the publisher for the events they cover. One correspondent per country, chosen by the editors on what has been published and on sustained engagement, reviewed every year. At the end of each year the editors publish the correspondents of the year.
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.
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.
- The editorial desk writes it up with you. Material gathered on site can be written up by the desk and published under your byline, exactly as our Editorial Guidelines state: you chose the subject and supplied the photographs and the sources, and nothing carrying your name is published until you have seen it in full and approved it. Where you write the piece yourself, it is edited, not rewritten.
- 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 byline 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 what any publication issues for its own correspondents, and it is issued for one event at a time.
What it is not, said plainly: it is not a press card and not a professional title. 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.
Who can join
- Students and faculty of partner institutions, with an email address at that institution. If yours is not yet a partner, write to us from your institutional address and we will contact the department.
- Fields: architecture, conservation and restoration, archaeology, art history, history, heritage and museum studies, landscape and urban studies.
- 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.
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 and the Corrections Policy, which apply to every byline including yours.
From your institutional email address. Begin with “Academic access”: your institution, your department, what you study or teach, and the city you would report from.