Articles for Rent

In my blog last week I addressed the issue of journal piracy, people actively hunting down journal article and re-posting them on forums so that they could be down loaded by others. This is a relatively predictable outcome to the shift to digital content, and I tried to make the point that in the end it probably did not effect the journal publishing system to much.

This week I am continuing with the journal access them by looking at the DeepDyve journal access system brought to my attention by this post which has a shout out to a U.T. librarian.

This company offers limited time access to journals articles through a “rental” system. Users can “rent” articles for .99 per day. Users do not have the ability to save off these article or to print them and they only have access to each article for 24 hours, at least at this level, there are other levels that allow users to access article for a week or a month with the price appropriately tiered. Users can browse the holdings of the company and view abstracts for free. On the page with the abstract the user has the option to purchase the article from the supplying institution. I decided to follow this link and the journal who published the article I was looking at also had a daily use option, but it was 8.00, DeepDyve was beginning to look like a better deal.

The system also has a set of widgets that collect articles and alert you via RSS feeds, this allows you to set up a query and have it alert you when new articles which match your query are available.

This program is aimed at those who have need of journal articles but do not have access to an institutional license, I really have no idea how big of a market this is, but I don't imagine that it is huge still I have been wrong before.

So how does it work as an article finder? Turns out pretty well, actually. This article reminded me of another article I read while putting together my blog for this week, it concerned searching abstracts for conclusion material and and extracting that data via semantic web / Linked data Format in order to print out summaries of relevant research, but I could not remember where I found it or who wrote it. So I typed what I could remember into the search bar and the article was on the first page. By the way the article can be found here , enjoy.

This is a different model for journal access than any we have seen yet. There are some things that I really like about it, and other things that I am for some reason hesitant to embrace.