DeepDyve (www.deepdyve.com), the scientific, technical, and medical search engine company that introduced a rental model for search results in October 2009 (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/DeepDyves-RenttoOwn-Service-57680.asp), is expanding its publisher relationships by adding more than 160,000 scholarly and professional journal articles from De Gruyter (www.degruyter.com) to the 30 million it presently has available. The venerable De Gruyter publishing company (it's 260 years old) specializes in the humanities and natural sciences. Katrin Siems, director of business development, commented that it is a key responsibility of the publisher "to assure comprehensive dissemination as well as convenient access to our content." De Gruyter content should start showing up in DeepDyve search results in March 2010.

A much more recently formed organization is CiteULike (www.citeulike.org). A social bookmarking service rather than a publisher, CiteULike is partnering with DeepDyve to put rental links on its site. Both CiteULike and DeepDyve look to serve academics, scholars, and other knowledge workers. Having DeepDyve's rental links on CiteULike, both companies believe, will enhance the affordability and availability of relevant research literature.

These partnerships expand DeepDyve's presence in what CEO Bill Park describes as a "fragmented industry in need of a more holistic approach." He urged me to think of the company's ongoing gathering of partners as "an affiliate network" and a way to stock more items on DeepDyve's virtual store shelves. Ironically, according to Park, the company actually benefits from the present bad economic climate. "People are willing to experiment more," he said, "now that journal subscriptions are being cancelled due to budget cuts." DeepDyve's mantra of "Research. Rent. Read." seems to be very appropriate in today's world.