Cambridge University Press, the folks behind Cambridge Journals is offering a new way for people to use their research papers, the digital rental model. Instead of paying $30 to $40 to purchase them you can now rent them for 24 hours, for as little as $5.99. This should be a boon for students and researchers to get the information they need and be done with it.
The new digital distribution rental model would allow researches to enjoy unfettered access to the high quality papers the company offers. These are ‘read only’ and cannot be used to make highlights and annotations. Right now only 100 different articles are used for this new program, but more should be available after the trial run. If the program is successful you will see Oxford and other publications test the waters.
“Article Rental is a direct response to the increasingly high cost of full article ownership through the subscription, document delivery and pay-per view routes that non-subscribers have to use in order to access to an article,” said Simon Ross, global journals director at at Cambridge UP. “From our analysis of user traffic on Cambridge Journals Online, we see millions of non-subscribers turnaway as they can only access the article title and abstract information. We can now provide an alternative low-barrier access route that will allow these readers to access the research that interests them.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
