New in the NASA Technical Report Server:

Dec 30, 2009

DeepDyve - a developing model for sci-tech information access?

DeepDyve is a site that allows you to search, browse, preview, and read approximately 32 million scientific, technical, and medical articles from publishers such as Springer, Taylor and Francis, and Elsevier.


Many of the journals included in DeepDyve are open access, meaning anyone can read them at no charge. However, DeepDyve also includes many journals that are typically accessed full text via subscription only. Users can preview those articles at no charge, but - much like Google's Book Search or Amazon's Look Inside the Book feature - cannot those previews can't be printed or saved. What makes DeepDyve different from other deep web search engines is the option to 'rent' the full text of an article normally available via subscription only for 99 cents. This 'rental' allows the user to view the full text of the article for an unlimited number of times for 24 hours.

DeepDyve also offers two different 'rental plans', each at different price points, allowed viewing periods, and number of downloads permitted per month. DeepDyve currently only accepts PayPal for payment, but is investigating other payment options.

Use the basic search:

or click on the 'Refine' button to the left of the Search button to refine your search using DeepDyve's advanced filters.

DeepDyve allows users to enter full sentences, or even full paragraphs, as search terms. You'll typically get a large number of results, but those can be easily narrowed using those advanced filters.

Having electronic access to scholarly information is vital to researchers and continuing research, and is important to everyone for educational and information discovery purposes. This might be an emerging model for electronic access to scientific and technical information, but is certainly still only in its beginning stages. It will be interesting to watch this type of site and see how it develops, and how it affects electronic access and scientific and technical publishing.