DeepDyve a privately-held, Redwood City, California-based technology company, originally made its mark by offering rental versions of articles from scholarly publications. With the growing availability of OA articles from major publishers, this seems the perfect time for the company to expand its offerings into the digital library realm.
DeepDyve's CEO, William Park commented, “There are a lot of products on the market designed for large institutional libraries. But after talking with our users, we saw a clear, unmet need for our Digital Library as these traditional products are too expensive to license and integrate for small to medium-sized research organizations.”
The Digital Library provides a fully integrated suite of workflow and collaboration tools to make research easy and affordable for an entire organization. It allows teams to search, organise and access the full text of five million Open Access articles and 20 million premium rentable papers from over 20,000 journals. In addition, researchers are able to purchase and download any paper from its comprehensive collection of 100 million citations—available in the reference database. The Digital Library supports automatic de-duplication of purchases, so if one team member has already bought a paper, it will be available to all plan members, avoiding repeat charges and reducing waste.
Typically, the tools and processes that allow researchers to access and manage literature involve expensive, custom solutions that are highly fragmented and can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars or more each year. Furthermore, these solutions lack the ability to organize, cite and collaborate directly with colleagues. With the Digital Library, literature from multiple sources can be stored in one place, with the addition of unified folders that can be accessed from a private cloud database. Articles can be annotated and bookmarked for quick reference, and users can coordinate research with colleagues by sharing folders and articles, exporting citations to popular reference managers, and sharing annotations.
“DeepDyve was built by researchers for researchers. The most common complaint we hear is fragmentation, namely that every article and tool is in a different silo,” said Park. “There is a tremendous amount of wasted time and money trying to find papers, and it’s virtually impossible to share or collaborate with colleagues with the current tools on the market. The Digital Library is the first one-stop platform that allows researchers to access virtually any paper, including those from within the company, all from one place, and easily organize those papers with their team.”
Although not likely to be a total replacement for library subscription databases, DeepDyve Digital Library could offer some interesting alternatives to existing products and serve as a lever in negotiations with vendors.