Frequently Asked Questions: Higher Education

Our Higher Education subscriptions work by whitelisting your school's IP addresses, which means the full campus community—instructors, staff, and students—get access to New Play Exchange without needing to log in when they visit the site while on a campus wireless network. The subscription gives everyone the ability to search for, read, and download scripts from the world's largest digital library of work by living writers, and it allows them to search for writers and to contact them (or their representatives) directly.

As a student, instructor, or staff member at a school with a Higher Education subscription, your school itself is the subscriber, and there’s nothing further you need to do to sign up! As long as you're accessing newplayexchange.org while on your campus network (whether that's physically on campus or off-site using your school's proxy IP address), you should see a welcome message for your school at www.newplayexchange.org. You don't need to log in from there, though if you also have an individual subscription, you can.

With a Higher Education subscription, you can search for, read, and download scripts, search for writers, and contact them (or their representatives) directly. 

We’ve prepared a webinar on this very subject HERE.

Everyone! Because this subscription works by giving IP-address-based access rather than individual login credentials, faculty, staff, and students from every department can use the site. They just need to visit www.newplayexchange.org when they’re on the campus wireless network, or off campus using your school’s proxy server (like Open Athens or an EZ Proxy). 

While we don’t offer discounts on any of our individual memberships, your school can purchase a Higher Education subscription that will give you and your campus access! As a student, you don’t pay anything extra for this service—it's included in your tuition or library services fee. You can make inquiries about your school’s NPX subscription with your school’s library. Librarians, faculty, and administrators, contact us HERE to learn more.

A Higher Education subscription provides access for an entire school population: students, faculty, and staff, all of whom are able to look up scripts, download and read them, and contact writers. An Organization subscription is meant to be used by ONE person managing the NPX profile of an organization. That one person can search for scripts and contact writers, in addition to sharing opportunities with writers as well.

The short answer: Not that much. 

The nuanced answer: It depends on your institution type and your school’s number of full-time equivalent (FTE) students. As a mission-focused non-profit, we’re dedicated to keeping Higher Education subscriptions as affordable as possible. From the tiniest arts academy to public four-year universities with student populations over 100k, there’s space for New Play Exchange in every type of education budget.