June 5, 2013 — Sunnyvale, CALIF — DeepDyve, the leading online rental service for scholarly and professional research articles, today announced a new “freemium” offering whereby users can preview the full text of any article for free for five minutes per day. Users will no longer have to settle for simply reading abstracts. With just an email address and password, users can sign up in seconds and gain free access to more than 8 million articles from 3,000 peer-reviewed journals that previously resided behind paywalls. Users can browse and sample as many articles as they wish, however, each article can only be previewed once every 24 hours.
DeepDyve’s new 5-Minute Freemium service also makes research more social by allowing users to share entire articles within their professional communities. With more than 1.8 million new articles published each year1, scientists and knowledge workers depend heavily on ‘word-of- mouth’ suggestions to filter what to read. However, researchers are less likely to recommend articles if their social networks are not able to access them. With its new freemium offering, DeepDyve believes scientists will now be far more willing to share interesting articles with their colleagues, followers and other social connections, leading to expanded dissemination and discovery.
“Researchers often complain that the abstract is not sufficient to determine the relevance and value of an article. Consequently, they either waste valuable time looking for free alternatives, or settle on reading just the abstract, losing out on the potential insights embedded in the article,” said William Park, DeepDyve’s CEO. “With our new offering, researchers can now get beyond the abstract, which we believe will lead to more readership, and ultimately, monetization since researchers will be more likely to purchase articles once they have full confidence that those articles will meet their needs.”
As the industry’s first and largest online rental service, DeepDyve has introduced various technologies to make scholarly content more affordable, particularly for users who are no longer affiliated with an academic library. With its latest innovation, DeepDyve is proud to announce that all of its 100+ publisher partners have agreed to allow their articles to be previewed for free.
“By creating a free and affordable option for any user - particularly those no longer affiliated with an academic library - DeepDyve has developed a legitimate and complementary channel for publishers to reach and serve new audiences worldwide,” said Till Moepert, director of ecommerce at Springer Science+Business Media.
In addition to DeepDyve’s new freemium service being announced today, the company also offers individual plans to suit different research requirements. For professional researchers, DeepDyve offers a $40-per-month subscription for virtually unlimited rentals from its entire collection of content. And for occasional users, DeepDyve offers a pack of five rental tokens for just $20, whereby articles can be rented and read repeatedly for a period of 30 days. Rented articles are ‘streamed’ from the Cloud and viewed through any web browser. To print and download an article, DeepDyve also provides an option to purchase PDFs either directly from DeepDyve or via one of its partners. Additionally, DeepDyve offers a full array of Group Plans for organizations that wish to provide company-wide access to DeepDyve.
DeepDyve provides simple and affordable access to millions of scholarly articles across thousands of peer-reviewed journals. DeepDyve has partnered with the world’s leading academic publishers, including Reed Elsevier, Springer, Nature, Wiley-Blackwell and more. Learn more by visiting us at www.DeepDyve.com, and follow us on Twitter (@deepdyve) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/deepdyve).
1 Mark Ware, Michael Mabe, “The STM Report: An Overview of Scientific and Scholarly Publishing” (STM Association, 2012)