Over the past few days, a company called DeepDyve, who run a search engine that we use on the PLoS.org website, announced a rental service for research articles. DeepDyve offers two types of content on its site - restricted-access content (from traditional publishers such as OUP, Wiley-Blackwell, Sage and others) which can be "rented" for $0.99 on a "pay-as-you-go" model and open-access content, which is always free.
The open-access and library community have been asking some pertinent questions about this new launch and our involvement with it which we'd like to address in this blog post.
Q: Is PLoS charging a fee for access to articles that appear in DeepDyve?
A: There is no financial gain to PLoS - all our content is freely available online to everyone, including commercial organizations, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License that we use.
Q: Why has PLoS agreed to provide its content to DeepDyve?
A. The Creative Commons License means that no permission is required to reuse PLoS content - in fact, creative reuse for commercial as well as non-commercial purposes is encouraged. Readers might like to know that almost every organization that wants to use PLoS content in bulk checks in with us first out of courtesy and this was the case with Deep Dyve. ...
Q. Is PLoS doing this to gain eyeballs on its content?
A. PLoS content is freely available to everyone who wants to reuse it. We want as many people as possible to take advantage of this content because research information is most powerful when more people can discover and use it and naturally, we're in favor of maximum exposure for the work of PLoS authors. ...
Finally, when we raised some of the concerns of the community, listed above, with DeepDyve they were responsive and immediately made the status of open-access content clearer on their website.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
