Off The Shelf

One of the most annoying parts of research is finding a reference to a great article, and then not having instant access online. Whether you’re a procrastinator waiting until the day before your paper is due, or just an impatient researcher who wants to read everything right away, no one likes to discover that what they want won’t be available right now.

Like many learners, I didn’t like to wait for interlibrary loan either. My solution while working on my degree was to spend a Saturday morning driving to various university libraries with a notepad, pen, and a sack of quarters for the copier.

Not everyone is willing to take my decidedly old-fashioned approach to bypassing interlibrary loan. These days there are some web-based alternatives forming.

DeepDyve is a scholarly article rental service. For 99 cents you can read an article online for 24 hours. No printing. No saving. Their collection is heavily weighted toward scientific journals, which can be extremely expensive. New car expensive, not just used car expensive.

Of course, many journal publishers are happy to sell you an article permanently. But at $25 each, that can be a very expensive way to do research. For the focused researcher, a rental for a day may be just what’s needed.

Some researchers aren’t content to pay any money for scholarly articles, and instead have resorted to the same type of file sharing that music lovers have used. Just as sharing music with strangers has run afoul of copyright law, swapping journal articles runs the same risks. A research article in the Internet Journal of Medical Informatics investigated the breadth of file sharing on one internet site. They estimated $700,000 worth of losses to journal publishers in the 6 month period of their study.

We’re still in the early days of scholarly information online. There are plenty of business models (legal and not) waiting to be tried. Who knows what the landscape will look like in another 10 years. Perhaps the journal subscription will disappear. Or perhaps libraries will simply be portals for content, rather the warehouses of information. In any case, the options for accessing scholarly articles are increasing. Just try to keep your discussion post from turning into a court case!

- Erin