Renting Scholarship

This week I read an interesting post on the Read Write Web blog titled "Netflix for Researchers: DeepDyve Launches Rental Service for Researchers". DeepDyve is a business that already indexes articles from thousands of journals (and apparently also thinks mis-spelling their name is cute and different). The company will now offer articles for rent. 99 cents for 1 day. DeepDyve rightly recognizes the increasing costs of online journal subscription as prohibitive to scholarship and learning, I think most libraries across the country are feeling that. But I'm not positive this will happen (from their press release headline): "Service Gives Unprecedented Access to Wealth of Research Data, Offers Publishers New Channel to Attract Customers and Monetize Content". Pretty much my new favorite byline (even though I didn't have a favorite before).

Basically DeepDyve's plan is to offer any article in their database for rent, at various prices for various time limits. $1 can get you 1 day, but no printing allowed! $9.99 to $19.99 per month will get you more articles and longer time limits, and a special yearly package allows printing. Read Write Web says that printing isn't an issue "because most users are just looking at these articles for a few facts or a bibliography and don't need them for extended periods of time". DeepDyve calls these users "knowledge workers" who are people that "use the web for research for their education, health and careers". Hm. Firstly, I would think that if someone is doing research, she would actually want some article she downloaded for a little while, possibly printed out in order for later reference. Secondly, the term "knowledge worker" is silly, although I don't doubt that someday we could see the iSchool turn into the kwSchool. DeepDyve sees "knowledge workers" as professionals needing up-to-date research but not actually doing the research, I think. An untapped consumer base.

I understand that for the Average Joe or Jane, accessing articles must be a real pain, especially if one isn't associated with an institution with a library of any type. But does the Average Joe or Jane actually look for scientific articles about how "High Nucleotide Divergence in Developmental Regulatory Genes Contrasts With the Structural Elements of Olfactory Pathways in Caenorhabditis" (an article listed on DeepDyve's homepage)? I might guess not, unless a serious medical situation is at hand. Perhaps a researcher's institution is private without interlibrary loan and does not have a particular journal, then I could see a person needing this service. I'm trying to envision a nurse or doctor trying to figure out a medical problem or wants the latest information on a topic not in JAMA (or maybe I'm just envisioning House). Then DeepDyve could be quite useful.

The part of this new service that I find particularly intriguing, however, is the strange middle-ground this takes between traditional journal access and open access. I don't think this model flies in the face of the current paradigm of scholarly publishing, since the company is only offering the product of the publishing, not changing the process. But I do like how extremely technical scholarship can now leave the hallowed halls of academia and its libraries and can slum it with knowledge workers for just a dollar. Even if for only a day.