It was not until I read the notice from Nature Network forum about Nature’s joining DeepDyve that I knew this new rental access service. It really enable my access to some highly desired journals such as Annu. Rev. Mater. Res., but there are still some journals that have not been permitted by the publisher for rent on DeepDyve yet. Some journals only allowed the most recent volumes for rent.
Of course DeepDyve has done a great job and it is still in the beta stage. But its profiting strategy seems much the same with an ordinary university library. I suspect the DeepDyve has to pay for the publisher annually with a fix price and it hopes to cover this cost by renting the bought journal within a year. Therefore the most popular journals and the most recent papers will most probably appear for rent, while those with low usage rate will be excluded to cut the budget – a common case too of the university libraries.
In my own practical case, mostly it is the access to old papers that are badly wanted because I love to collect the history of every research direction by myself. For many publishers the historical archives charge additional money, so there are certainly less ways for these archives to become more “affordable”.
My solution is contacting my librarian for inter-library service across China. Requesting other libraries for scanned versions only charges me approximately RMB 1.00 per page, then I own the copies. But this is of course more time-consuming than renting a view-only access online.
Hopefully as more people rent paper on DeepDyve it will have enough budget to provide access to more journals in the future.