I saw this post on TechCrunch indicating that the online Encyclopedia Britannica is now available without charge to web publishers. The definition of web publisher is charmingly broad, while hedging accordingly: “This program is intended for people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers. We reserve the right to deny participation to anyone who in our judgment doesn’t qualify.” To apply for access, go to this page. I received a response with a validation code within an hour.

From what I can tell, what you actually get is a free one-year subscription. At least that’s what the subscription process makes it look like. But all other indications suggest that the offer is for indefinite access, so perhaps they just want to re-evaluate participants annually.

One of the subscriber “benefits” is the ability to link to full-text content from the EB and let any of your readers access that content without charge. So if I wanted to help you examine the story about Venezuela and the Library of Congress that was discussed in Uncontrolled Vocabulary #38, I could point you in the direction of the EB article on the Library of Congress or the article on Venezuela. Of course, I’m a librarian; I can do better than that, but that’s not the point.

Why such a generous offer, you ask? Here’s what EB has to say to that exact question: “Britannica covers a wide range of topics with thousands of articles and multimedia features. They’re relevant and useful, and we’d like more people to be able to take advantage of them.”

You can almost taste the altruism, no? It’s all about the link love, of course. More precisely, I imagine it’s about the Google juice that comes from said link love, which is so hard for a walled garden like EB to accumulate. I’m sure this will be the one and only time I feed the beast.

Updated 4/20/08 12:29 AM: Jason Griffey offers up a far more cogent and critical analysis of the issues attending Britannica Webshare.