Figshare and F1000 integrate data into publication: could TreeBASE do the same?

Quick thoughts on the recent announcement by figshare and F1000 about the new journals being launched on the F1000 Research site. The articles being published have data sets embedded as figshare widgets in the body of the text, instead of being, say, a static table. For example, the article:

Oliver, G. (2012). Considerations for clinical read alignment and mutational profiling using next-generation sequencing. F1000 Research. doi:10.3410/f1000research.1-2.v1

has a widget that looks like this:


You can interact with this widget to view the data. Because the data are in figshare those data are independently citable, e.g. the dataset "Simulated Illumina BRCA1 reads in FASTQ format" has a DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.92338.

Now, wouldn't it be cool if TreeBASE did something similar? Imagine if uploading trees to TreeBASE were easy, and that you didn't have to have published yet, you just wanted to store the trees and make them citable. Imagine if TreeBASE had a nice tree viewer (no, not a Java applet, a nice viewer that uses SVG, for exmaple). Imagine if you could embed that tree viewer as a widget when you published your results. It's a win all round. People have an incentive to upload trees (nice viewer, place to store them, and others can cite the trees because they'd have DOIs). TreeBASE builds its database a lot more quickly (make it dead easy to upload tree), and then as more publishers adopt this style of publishing TreeBASE is well placed to provide nice visualisations of phylogenies pre-packaged, interactive, and citable. And let's not stop there, how about a nice alignment viewer? Perhaps this is the something currently rather moribund PLoS Currents Tree of Life could think about supporting?

DeepDyve - renting scientific articles

Bit late, but I stumbled across DeepDyve, which provides rental access to scientific papers for as little as $0.99. The pitch to publishers is:

Today, scholarly publisher sites receive over 2 billion visits per year from users who are unaffiliated with an institution yet convert less than 0.2% into a purchase or subscription. DeepDyve’s service is designed for these ‘unaffiliated users’ who need an easy and affordable access to authoritative information vital to their careers.

Renting a paper means you get to read it online, but you can't print or download it, and access is time limited (unless you purchase the article outright). You can also purchase monthly plans (think Spotify for papers).

It's an interesting model, and the interface looks nice. Here's a paper on Taxonomy and Diversity (http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1003602221172):


Leaving aside the issue of whether restricted access to the scientific literature is a good idea (even if it is relatively cheap) I'm curious about the business model and the long tail. One could imagine lots of people downloading a few high-visibility papers, and my sense (based on no actual data I should stress) is that DeepDyve's publishing partners are providing access to their first-tier journals.

Taxonomic literature is vast, but most individual papers will have few readers (describing a single new species is usually not big news, with obvious exceptions). But I wonder if in aggregate the potential taxonomic readership would be enough to make cheap access to that literature economic. Publishers such as Wiley, Taylor and Francis, and Springer have digitised some major taxonomic journals, how will they get a return on this? I suspect the a price tag of, say, €34.95 for an article on seabird lice (e.g., "Neue Zangenläuse (Mallophaga, Philopteridae) von procellariiformen und charadriiformen Wirten" http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00260996) will be too high for many people, but the chance to rent it for 24 hours for, say, $0.99, would be appealing. If this is the case, then maybe this would encourage publishers to digitise more of their back catalogue. It would be nice if everything is digitised and free, but I could live with digitised and cheap.