Thank you for your interest in supporting our work! Your donation helps us make the internet a saner place to learn things. We also do a significant amount of student training in science communication. Find out why Sciworthy cannot easily rely on typical online content monetization strategies [Read More].
How to Support Sciworthy
Your generous donation helps us maintain our website and submission system, support our writers and interns, and develop our online courses.
We want content to be more open and objective.
News is the main way people hear about the science that affects their lives. There are few alternatives aside from reading scientific journals, which can be too technical, behind paywalls, or both!
When it comes to science, objectivity matters. There are troubling trends in online content, such as opinion journalism and advocacy journalism, that hurt the public’s ability to understand what’s really going on. Meanwhile, online content is more subjective than ever, according to a RAND Corporation report analyzing 15 news outlets over 3 decades. A Pew Research Center study found that many articles are written in a way that makes it hard to tell the difference between fact and opinion, and politics has a huge influence. It is now becoming controversial to even strive for objectivity in reporting at all – but it shouldn’t be.
We don't think advertisers should drive the discussion.
Ads are a way of life on the internet. You know the kind — annoying pop-ups, unrelated images or gifs interrupting the flow of an article you’re trying to read, page margins littered with graphics asking you to buy things.
But what about the advertisements you can’t see as clearly? Believe it or not, a lot of what you read online might be paid for by sponsors. This content goes by many names in the industry — SEO content, sponsored content, native advertising, and more. Many articles are written to promote a product, brand, or business, but are disguised as informative content. Websites make money by charging businesses a fee for posting this content and intermingling it with their regular content.
Sometimes sites are kind enough to tag these posts as “sponsored,” but they are not always so obvious. They may contain links back to product pages, which are more obvious. Or they may contain commonly searched keywords that are associated with a brand or product the company wants to promote.
Help Sciworthy stay impartial
Sciworthy does not do ads, opinion/advocacy reporting, guest blogs, or sponsored content. Consider us the encyclopedia of the frontier of science. Sciworthy thinks readers need more objective options for learning about the latest science, besides journalism.
We have been volunteering our time since 2011 to help keep advertising and politics out of science, but we have grown too much to keep doing it for free.
The good news is, we are a non-profit. So, you help us avoid having to run ads or appeal to emotion by donating to us once or becoming a member.
Are we trying to survive entirely from donations?
Our online courses and our Professor Partnership Program support our organization, too.