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With Silke Fürst’s research article “In the service of good journalism and audience interests? How audience metrics affect news quality”, the 150,000th entry was received on ZORA in February 2021. Silke Fürst has been a research assistant at the Institute of Communication Studies and Media Research (IKMZ) at UZH since November 2019 and is working on the SNF research project “University Communication in Switzerland”. In 2021, she will complete her doctoral thesis on “The audience is the message: public discourses on media audiences”.

Her research article, published in 2020 in the open access journal Media and Communication by Cogitatio Press, examines the extent to which online usage numbers (or click-through numbers) influence the quality of news. The article itself grew out of a combination of two research projects: one is her own dissertation examining the role of usage data in journalistic reporting. On the other hand, Ms. Fürst has already dealt with the importance of usage data together with colleagues from the University of Fribourg in the context of an earlier research project on “Working conditions and freedom of reporting in journalistic organizations”.

The communication scientist not only publishes her research mostly Open Access – preferably in Platinum Open Access journals or journals that allow green Open Access. She herself is also co-editor of an open access journal, Studies in Communication Sciences (SComS), which is published via UZH’s own publication platform HOPE. She had submitted her article “In the service of good journalism and audience interests?” at the request of the guest editors of a themed issue. Since the topic was exciting and the journal Media and Communication is Open Access, it was easy for her to accept, only the financing of the article processing charges of 900 EUR was still unclear at that time. However, the publication funding of the main library took over the contribution after a successful application.

Silke Fürst is not the only Open Access enthusiast at the IKMZ. The entry on ZORA was initiated by Niels Mede, also a research assistant at the IKMZ. He regularly collects all contributions from the “Science Communication” department and sends them to the institute’s librarian, Andrea Dreher, who then enters them on ZORA. As a submitter for the IKMZ, Ms. Dreher will probably have her work cut out for her with so much open access commitment.