You Don't Need to Purchase Articles for Outrageous Fees Anymore. You Can Now RENT Them Instead!

In putting together my last post I noticed something interesting (disturbing?) from the Cambridge Journals site.  If you would like to purchase a PDF of the Parringtonia gracilis redescription paper I just mentioned it will cost you $45.00 U.S. The atrociousness of this has been discussed in detail at several other blogs most notably by the SV-POW guys.  Anyhow, for those of you who don't want to (or can't afford to) shell out this kind of cash for a single article there is now another option available.  You can rent the article instead for the low(er) price of $5.99 U.S.!!!  You get 24 hour access to the article, which is probably enough to cram in a couple of readings if you don't really want to fully comprehend the paper. Also just think of the hard drive space you'll save if all of your PDFs 'disappeared' after a 24 hour period.  Currently I'm very hard pressed to think of a reason why this would be attractive. I suppose if you simply wanted to download the article and print it for future use.... Anyone else able to present this in a positive light?

3 comments:

  1. Surely printing is disabled for the rental version? Don't really want to spend $6 to find out. :)

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  2. This is nothing new. I've oftentimes seen articles (including ones in JVP) which say you can buy 24 hour access to the article for some amount, or buy permanent access to the article for about $45.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I suppose you could go through the paper printing screenshots if printing is disabled. DRM usually slows everything down or makes access impossible so 24 hours might not be enough time after you've spent a chunk of that trying to open the paper.

    ReplyDelete

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