William F. Garrity

See the piece below about Deep Dyve--"Research. Rent. Read"--by Frederic Lardinois in ReadWriteWeb. 

I don't think he knows what he's talking about--emphases below, mine--but we'll see if the product succeeds.  I have my doubts that it will. 

Netflix for Researchers: Deep Dyve Launches Rental Service for Research Articles

Written by Frederic Lardinois / October 27, 2009

Buying a single article from a scientific journal is usually prohibitively expensive if you are not a student or teacher at a school that subscribes to the journal. Most academic journals are available only behind these paywalls, but Deep Dyve just announced a new product that could radically change the marketplace for scientific, technical and medical articles. Until now, Deep Dyve only indexed articles and directed users to the journal's own site. Starting today, users can rent articles from Deep Dyve. Accounts start with a pay-as-you-go account, by which users are charged $0.99 to keep an article for one day, and go up to an unlimited account for $19.99 per month.

Deep Dyve also offers an intermediate account for $9.99 per month, by which users can download 20 articles and keep them for up to seven days. You can sign up for a trial account here. Deep Dyve accepts only PayPal for payments.

Unless you subscribe to the unlimited plan, the only issue with Deep Dyve's new plan is that you can rent articles but not print them. This is a minor issue, however, 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. At $19.99 per month, the unlimited plan is cheaper than buying one article from a journal per month, so the price of the service won't be an issue for most of the service's target audience anyway.

Con't

Where does Deep Dyve get its content?  From the FAQ:

Q: Why can't I download or print some of the articles?

A: DeepDyve’s agreements with our publisher partners are limited to rental, or view-only, access to their content. Our publishers offer the ability to purchase, download and print directly from their sites.

It seems it doesn't actually "have" any of the content; that it, rather, is just an aggregator-viewer of publisher web sites.