DeepDyve Offers Viable Alternative To Academic Paywalls

March 30, 2020

Academic paywalls are the bane of researchers even in the midst of the current health crisis. Why? Unless you are affiliated with a university or learning institution, you do not have immediate access to credible academic databases. Sure, there are there public libraries, but their database resources are limited . There might be an alternative solution that is actually viable and affordable: DeepDyve.

What is DeepDyve?

“DeepDyve offers an affordable monthly subscription service that gives unlimited full-text access to an amazing collection of premium academic publications.”

Users have access to over eighteen million articles, including full text pieces from over 15,000 peer-reviewed journals. The great thing about DeepDyve is that it is free for freelancers to create accounts, save their searches, curate their content, and export their citations. The freelance version of DeepDyve is limited to articles from Google Scholar (a notoriously low quality database), PubMed, and abstracts from all other publications. DeepDyve has a Pro account option for $49/month or $360/year that gives users access to all content.

That is much cheaper than signing up for academic databases on an individual basis as well as allows users to research from their own home without an academic institution affiliation. However does the cheaper price offer decent research materials?

DeepDyve does not appear to be hiding anything, because it lists all the different resources users can access with a subscription fee. Users can explore resources by research topic and see what a Deepdyve subscription offers.

DeepDyve could be a newer model for academic database and journal access. The big academic publishers still hold tons of power, but companies like DeepDyve could turn the publishing tide.

Whitney Grace, March 30, 2020

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