DeepDyve - renting scientific articles

Bit late, but I stumbled across DeepDyve, which provides rental access to scientific papers for as little as $0.99. The pitch to publishers is:

Today, scholarly publisher sites receive over 2 billion visits per year from users who are unaffiliated with an institution yet convert less than 0.2% into a purchase or subscription. DeepDyve’s service is designed for these ‘unaffiliated users’ who need an easy and affordable access to authoritative information vital to their careers.

Renting a paper means you get to read it online, but you can't print or download it, and access is time limited (unless you purchase the article outright). You can also purchase monthly plans (think Spotify for papers).

It's an interesting model, and the interface looks nice. Here's a paper on Taxonomy and Diversity (http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1003602221172):


Leaving aside the issue of whether restricted access to the scientific literature is a good idea (even if it is relatively cheap) I'm curious about the business model and the long tail. One could imagine lots of people downloading a few high-visibility papers, and my sense (based on no actual data I should stress) is that DeepDyve's publishing partners are providing access to their first-tier journals.

Taxonomic literature is vast, but most individual papers will have few readers (describing a single new species is usually not big news, with obvious exceptions). But I wonder if in aggregate the potential taxonomic readership would be enough to make cheap access to that literature economic. Publishers such as Wiley, Taylor and Francis, and Springer have digitised some major taxonomic journals, how will they get a return on this? I suspect the a price tag of, say, €34.95 for an article on seabird lice (e.g., "Neue Zangenläuse (Mallophaga, Philopteridae) von procellariiformen und charadriiformen Wirten" http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00260996) will be too high for many people, but the chance to rent it for 24 hours for, say, $0.99, would be appealing. If this is the case, then maybe this would encourage publishers to digitise more of their back catalogue. It would be nice if everything is digitised and free, but I could live with digitised and cheap.

My favourite Apple moment

In light of today's news here's my favourite Mac, the original iBook.

In many ways, it wasn't the machine itself so grabbed me (cool as it was), it was the experience of unpacking it when it arrived in my office over a decade ago. In the box with the computer and the mains cord was a disc about the size of a hockey puck (on the right in the image above). I looked at it and wondered what on Earth it was. It looked like a giant yo-yo, with cable wrapped around instead of string. Then the penny dropped — it was the power supply. You plugged the mains cord into the yo-yo, then unwound just as much cord as you needed (oh, and when you connected it in to your iBook the plug glowed orange if the battery needed charging, green if it was fully charged). The child inside me squealed with delight (being a grown up I laughed out loud, rather than actually squealing).

The iBook still works (the battery is long dead, but plug the yo-yo into the mains and it still works), and it manages to run an early version of Mac OS X.

If anybody has to ask why people love Apple products, it's not because of the "brand", or the "exclusivity", it's because of the joy they can invoke. Someone cared enough to make the most mundane task — plugging a laptop into the mains — into a thing of beauty.

Taxonomy - crisis, what crisis?

Following on from the last post How many species are there, and why do we get two very different answers from same data? another interesting paper has appeared in TREE:

Lucas N. Joppa, David L. Roberts, Stuart L. Pimm The population ecology and social behaviour of taxonomists Trends in Ecology & Evolution doi:10.1016/j.tree.2011.07.010

The paper analyses the "ecology and social habits of taxonomists" and concludes:

Conventional wisdom is highly prejudiced. It suggests that taxonomists were a formerly more numerous people, are in 'crisis', are becoming endangered and are generally asocial. We consider these hypotheses and reject them to varying degrees.

Queue flame war on TAXACOM, no doubt, but it's a refreshing conclusion, and it's based on actual data. Here I declare an interest. I was a reviewer, and in a fit of pique recommended rejection simply because the authors don't make the data available (they do, however, provide the R scripts used to do the analyses). As the authors patiently pointed out in their response to reviews, the various explicit or implicit licensing statements attached to taxonomic data mean they can't provide the data (and I'm assuming that in at least some cases the dark art of screen scrapping was used to get the data).

There's an irony here. Taxonomic databases are becoming hot topics, generating estimates of the scale of the task facing taxonomy, and diagnosing state of the discipline itself (according to Joppa et al. it's in rude health). This is the sort of thing that can have a major impact on how people perceive the discipline (and may influence how many resources are allocated to the subject). If taxonomists take issue with the analyses then they will find them difficult to repeat because the taxonomic data they've spent their careers gathering are under lock and key.