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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Have you looked at DeepDyve [1]?

nope it didn't turn up in my google search. I generally google the title, when I get desperate I google title+"pdf", it has never worked so far, but I keep being hopeful.

"We will begin billing your Payment Method for monthly membership fees at the end of the free trial period of your membership unless you cancel prior to the end of the free trial period". I guess I will not sign up.

That's only for the Professional Membership trial. Select the Freelancer Membership. Since the Freelancer Membership is free, they do not ask for any payment information.

That gives you free "5 minute rentals", which are designed to let you decide if you want to actually rent a given article. If you decide to rent some articles, and so need to pay for that, you'll then have to give payment information, of course.

The rentals are for 30 days, and are sold in packs of 5 rentals for $20. Yes, free would be better, but compared to the alternative of paying $20-40 per article to buy single article access from major journals, DeepDyve looks like a great bargain for the researcher who does not have access to a university library.

I personally have always found DeepDyve to be kinda pointless, as when you need to go back and refresh your memory before citing the article later, your access has expired.

Hi there, I'm an engineer at DeepDyve. I'm wondering how long your rental was for - was it a 30 day rental? And was 30 days too short to cite the article later? I'll talk to some people here, but we may be able to extend that period pretty easily.

Either the fees are hidden on the site or I need more coffee.

after a bit of clicking, I had a banner saying $40/month for unlimited

They are somewhat covered in the FAQ, linked to from the bottom of the page. Some excerpts:

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The Freelancer Plan is a free plan with the option to purchase $20 packs which allows you to rent any 5 articles for up to 1 year from the start of the plan. Once an article has been rented, it can be read as often as you like until its expiration in 30 days. Any pre-paid rentals that remain unused after 1 year will become void.

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The Professional Plan is $40 per month and entitles you to "virtually" unlimited rentals each month, i.e. you can rent up to 40 articles per month and/or purchase and download up to 40 PDFs per month for a 20% discount. If you need even more access, please contact us because you are extraordinary!

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5-minute rentals are a great way to scan through any rentable article, for free. You get to read the complete full-text of an article in your browser for 5 minutes.

You can do as many 5-minute rentals as you want for free-- just not the same article twice in the same day. Rental tokens are available for unlimited rental access to the articles for 30 days.

Copying, printing, and downloading aren't included with 5-minute rentals.

I would gladly skim 40 articles a month. I guess I skim more like 400 internet pages a day, these don't include a lot of scientific paper because it's a pain in the butt to find them (you have to look for them, you never stumble on them), but there's no reason I would not skim 100-200 on month if they where as common as normal webpages.

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