Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Website of the Week

DeepDyve – a service for finding, browsing and renting journal articles

DeepDyve (http://www.deepdyve.com/) has been around since 2009 as a journal rental service. The service was developed by two bioinformatics scientists who were frustrated by the inconvenience and cost of accessing peer-reviewed journal articles. Their goal is to reduce the cost of buying articles online by up to 90% and provide much greater access to scholarly journal articles.

They recently added a free service to let people who have signed up with them to browse journal articles for free for five minutes. They also developed a browser plug-in that suggests journal articles related to your searches with Google and other sites.

DeepDyve allows any user who signs up to read over 32 million articles from authoritative sources.

Publishers include Wiley, Springer, Elsevier, Nature, IEEE, and a variety of university presses. DeepDyve has also integrated access to over 10 million open access articles from places such as PLOS and PubMed Central. All the latest content is available, with no embargo periods. The articles are full-text .

After signing up for the freemium service a user can go to the DeepDyve website and look at the content of an article for five minutes. The patron can only look at that particular article once per day for free. This allows a user to determine if the article is something they really want. It is possible to rent journal articles for 30 days. It costs $20 to rent 5 articles. Rented articles cannot be printed.

DeepDyve offers a web browser plug-in. For users who have the plug-in a link will show up if DeepDyve holds content related to searches. For example doing a Google search on the phrase “strain theory” brings up several articles on the subject as part of the search results from Google. The DeepDyve Plugin also automatically links searches from PubMed and Google Scholar to articles on DeepDyve.
You can find related information for every article discovered by clicking the “More like this” button on the search results page or any article page. DeepDyve accounts provide features that allow you to create a personalized home page. You choose your favorite journals and all the newest articles are displayed for quick browsing.

DeepDyve is seeing interest from smaller colleges and universities and is willing to discuss allowing institutions access to journals. Institutions only pay for what it actually used by people affiliated with the intuition. Users can be aggregated by IP addresses.

Review by John Stanton, SWC Librarian

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