DeepDyve, a research engine for the Deep Web, has 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 year, 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.
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. All of DeepDyve's over 100 publisher partners have agreed to allow their articles to be previewed for free.
