It’s been years since I let my subscription to Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery lapse. I could barely afford it and, as those Shriners soon found out, I am not actually a surgeon. However, I do enjoy pouring a glass of Old Granddad, sitting down in my favorite chair, and reading up on Snapping Scapula Syndrome or the Three-Dimensional Kinematics of the Rheumatoid Wrist After Partial Arthrodesis. It does a body – and a soul – good.
Thanks to a new online market, DeepDyve, I’m never further than a click away from those relaxing and enlightening scientific papers. The site, launched today, offers full-text search of scientific articles along with 99 cent downloads and a subscription service that allows fans of Clinical Chemistry to read as many stories as they’d like.
Why is this important to me? you ask. What do I look like? A rocket surgeon? Well, there is an untapped market for scientific research. Doctors, for example, may have access to these journals at school but they rarely can afford them in their own private practices. Scientists, amateur or professional, may want to look up something important to their work and the ill and infirm may want to look up their treatment options. Because most journals are kept offline, most readers thus far have resorted to piracy either by asking for a photocopy from a friend or downloading the journals from pirate research sites. Yes, pirate research sites exist.
DeepDyve launched last year as a search company. Their specific expertise was in large string searching, allowing you to look for multiple topics in one search string. This led to work in the research space and, ultimately, the company changed into a article rental service. Articles cost 99 cents for 24 hours and an unlimited plan for $19.99 a month. A $9.99 plan allows you to access 20 articles per month for up to seven days each.
The site currently holds 30 million articles and each article is indexed and available in a free preview. You can create email and RSS alerts on specific topics and a “More Like This” feature allows you to dig deeper into a topic.
The company is based in Menlo Park and received $9 million in angel funding.
Are you a big fan of research? Leave a comment and we’ll be giving away free subscriptions to DeepDyve to 10 random readers. Now back to Spinal Injuries and the Sacral Arch and another snoot of whiskey.
“Like the iTunes for Scientific Papers”
why dont you just say the “store for scientific papers.” First, most people do not uses itunes. Next, the analogy is ambiguous considering itunes is a media player and contains a store.
I think eventually Google Scholar will destroy this. Only a matter of time but it’s cheaper than certain sites out there already so at least it will push down prices of all research paper. Go competition!
“I think eventually Google Scholar will destroy this.”
Volumes of implications are contained in this simple statement, one that deserves multiple entire articles.
If Google is allowed to blithely mass scan everything without the slightest advance consideration of the copyright owners – and then uses political pull, at least in the U.S., to get preferential treatment for this mass violation of copyright – then companies such as deepdyve are starting up against a huge headwind. But these efforts need to succeed. Even the fledgling search capability of deepdyve greatly exceeds the pathetic 1990’s style Google search of their illegally scanned archive.
Would like a subscription
Thanks!
Well, not a bad site, it can come in handy sometimes. I think I’ll be needing that subscription you are giving away. Thanks.
Well, it does not look too bad. As a student I’m certainly willing to take a look at it. But I’m really not sure about the future potential as Google really has way more potential and can destroy it for sure if they want.
This is a great idea….the premise of Science is that knowledge is shared….but the publishing middlemen have evolved into a high-priced, profit driven gateway to stand between research and its widespread publication. I’m wondering if other high-end publishers like Elsevier will fight this service in court. Anyway…awesome service!
Also check out http://www.mendeley.com/
Not sure if this is the best place to put this, but have any of you been invited into the Twitter “lists” beta rollout?
http://thecolle...s-list-control/
(I promise I am not trying to spam, just thought TechCrunch would want to know about it)
http://www.tech...-lists-rollout/
I feel late to the party now. Sorry!
Sente has better functionality (storage, management, citation, annotation) than Mendeley http://www.thir...etsoftware.com/
Ha! Mendeley actually uses a similar phrase: “Like iTunes for research papers.”
Well, I suppose it’s an obvious comparison.
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I love research! Working on a few papers for publication myself.
I’m all for this. I hope they follow Siggraph, IEEE and other technical conferences.
This sounds promising… I’ll have to give it a try and see if it can find a particular paper I’ve been looking for that was published in 1974… It costs way too much to buy from the IEEE! I think a 7 day rental period would be all I’ll need.
It may be very hard to find a paper from 1974. You may need to find someone at a major university with an old library. Still, many of those have been dumping their old collections. Caltech had journals going back to the late 1890’s but I think those were sent to a museum or safe storage.
There are a lot of people interested in science and nature who may not be professionals. I wonder if any of these journals feature material that could be accessible to informed general readers? I bet science journalists will love this.
Great, they’re selling the results of our tax-funded research back to us. Thanks guys, great work. Shouldn’t this be free?
Not all academic research is free, and journals are rarely subsidized at all. It takes a lot of work from highly skilled people to put these publications together, and it’s entirely reasonable to charge money to recover those costs and provide some profits to the publishing companies.
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Absolutely amazing!!!! :O
Does anyone have any info on the size of the company? I’d be interested in what resources they had when they built this. CrunchBase lists some of the hires, but doesn’t have any sort of total that I could find.
I tried searching a few key papers relevant to my thesis on this and Google Scholar. DeepDyve failed to find them, whereas they came up as the first result on GS, complete with pdf link.
Maybe I’ll use it every now and again, but it’s too unreliable for serious research. I can’t use something that might end up with me missing out on potentially important articles.
This sounds awesome! I think it’ll be a big money saver for non-profits. Sign me up for one of those subscriptions!
Subscription sounds perfect.Need it!
Not sure what the traction for this will be, but it’s an interesting concept nonetheless.
I would definitely love a subscription….
Would love a subscription. Thanks.
http://arxiv.org/ has all that and it is free
wow! arxiv is awesome!
I love arXiv.org too, but it’s an open site and the content is relatively unreliable. Professional peer-reviewed journals add significant value to the papers they publish. That value simply isn’t present on arXiv.org. The world needs both kinds of outlets.
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Well, I searched for a few things “XMRV and Chronic Fatigue” and then S”tronglyocentrotus purpuratus Replication factor A” (my thesis work) – it seems it is better at older articles but that’s still a good thing. I hate the idea of paying $20 for an article I am not sure I even need.
Thanks for the heads up – that is why I follow TechCrunch!
(Hoping for the subscription!)
It’s a great service. I am looking for ‘video mining’ material and I found some good research papers on DeepDyve. Good job and good luck guys!!
Would like a subscription.Thanks.
I’d love love love a suscription – obviously.
Looks interesting, I’d like to give it a try…
This is wonderful – and it is priced well enough to be affordable but in a business model that would not cannibalize existing academic subscriptions business models.
The price is right – much cheaper than retrieving articles through SpringerLink, Elsevier and the like.
On the other hand, locating a specific article seems harder than it ought to be. (I’ve been spoiled by the Pubmed interface of the NCBI, it seems).
Following up on myself – those 99 cents (or the monthly plans) only get you access to the papers on the Deepdyve site. You ‘rent’ them, but can’t download or print them. You _do_ get a convenient way of purchasing the papers from the actual providers.
I rather like hardcopies for scientific papers, actually. But the price is still right.
Interesting.
I was disappointed not to find high-impact titles like Nature or Cell in here. Any real research can’t skip those. Also, it seems like they’re charging for some stuff I can get for free on publisher sites? Weird.
hey, i could use one of the subscriptions…
I would like a subscription please. Thanks!
Interesting concept – most of the big Higher Ed institutions manage their own subscriptions through portals such as Web of Science in the UK so I would see it aimed more at private individuals. Services like CiteULike and Mendeley are somewhat different in that they’re social community / recommender system for CiteULike and group referencing for Mendeley. Would be interesting to evaluate this approach though so please feel free to chuck a sub my way if there’s one left!
Subscription, please. Thank you.
I’m graduating in December and would love a place to access research articles.
Awesome! I’ve been waiting for something like this…sign me up!
You can’t download or print the papers that you “rent” for a fee? I’m sorry, but remind me why I should give this a second look?
this seems pretty cool for hypochondriacs. my wife will love it, so she can learn all about the bizzare and rare diseaes she and the kids might have….please send gift subscription. thx
There’s something weird about the DeepDyve search function. It appears to give 87,250 hits for any random nonsense word.
So when a search for “arthroplasty” produces 113,065 hits, is that really the right number? Or is it 25,815 real hits plus a bunch of irrelevant ones?
That’s a problem, I think.
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This sounds interesting – I would love a subscription! Wonder how library subscriptions would feed into this? i.e. If I have access to the free text of an article, through my academic library, might I get the article for free through DeepDyve?
I would like a subscription. Would be great to compare it against other competing systems.
that sounds great! i’d like to have a subscription!