DeepDyve launches 'five-minute freemium' service

DeepDyve, which provides online rental of scholarly and professional research articles, has announced a new “freemium” offering that allows users to preview the full text of any article for free for five minutes per day.

According to the company, 'with just an email address and password, users can sign up in seconds and gain free access to more than eight 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.'

The service also promises to make research more social by allowing users to share entire articles within their professional communities. DeepDyve believes that, with the new service, scientists will 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,' commented 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.'

DeepDyve said that all of its 100+ publisher partners, which include Elsevier, Springer, Nature Publishing Group, Wiley-Blackwell and IEEE, 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 e-commerce at Springer Science+Business Media.