Many researchers are surprised to find that leaving the university also means leaving behind something they didn’t expect-easy access to peer-reviewed literature. Especially for those who have already worked in start-ups or other smaller organizations, finding a way to conduct the systematic literature review required by regulatory requirements—or even just getting to know the latest situation in their field—may take time in Search online, spend a lot of money, or both.
“In the past I could go to the library and find anything I needed,” said Dan Morgan, a bioinformatician. “Then, when I graduated, I went to work for a small company that didn’t have the budget to purchase subscriptions to dozens of journals. Now when I need to read an article, I often have to search everywhere, trying to find a way to read it. “
Once a researcher does find an article, organizing it becomes another chore.
“Everyone on my team manages their papers in a different way,” Morgan said. “Some use reference managers, some put them on a cloud drive, and some just save them on their own computers. It’s hard to see what others have discovered in any organized way.”
This dilemma is the motivation for William Parker, the CEO of subscription literary platform. , Trying to find better ways to help researchers find what they need.
“There are many products on the market designed for large institutional libraries,” Park said. “And there are many products designed for individual researchers. But after talking to our users, we saw a clear unmet need of the tens of thousands of organizations in the middle: there is still a need to access and manage information from many different publishers. Literature, but small and medium-sized company budgets that don’t have a lot of resources.”
From these conversations was born the DeepDyve Digital Library. The platform is designed to enable research organizations to easily and affordably discover, access, organize, and collaborate on peer-reviewed papers. This is an innovation that lasted nearly a decade.
“We have been in existence for about 10 years,” Park said. “We were founded by two scientists in this situation. They went to work in small companies as soon as they graduated and couldn’t believe how difficult it was to suddenly find a paper.” Park Inspired by the changes that streaming music and video services have brought to digital media, He and his team decided to see if they could apply the same model to peer-reviewed journals.
“We started meeting with publishers to bring them this new idea: a service where users can read articles online for a fixed monthly fee instead of buying and downloading individual articles.” Springer Nature, Wiley and The New Publishers such as England Journal of Medicine signed agreements, and users followed suit. Then something unexpected happened.
“When we first started, our users were individual researchers. When our full-text collection exceeded 15 million articles, we began to see users asking us to provide group plans that they could use for the entire team,” Park said. “At that time we realized there was a greater demand there.” When they talked to users, they heard that just accessing papers was only part of the battle.
“The most common complaint we hear over and over is that every article and tool is in a different island,” Parker said. “Trying to use the tools available on the market to find papers will waste a lot of time and money-much of the content they find does not comply with copyright, and it is almost impossible to share or collaborate with colleagues.
“We have built the digital library as a one-stop platform, allowing researchers to find and access almost all papers from one place, including papers that have been purchased by the organization, and can easily organize these papers with their team,” Park added road.
The complexity is also reflected in the ease of installation and maintenance of the tools.
“Our IT team is already very busy,” Morgan said. “A lot of the things we see require a lot of setup and maintenance; we don’t have the time or resources to do this.” The digital library designed by DeepDyve is completely cloud-based and requires no setup or ongoing maintenance.
So how was the response?
“We let the company watch the 10-minute demo and register immediately,” Park said. “It’s incredible that there is such a huge demand for things that solve these problems that organizations have existed for years.”
This initial version is just the beginning.
“We have gotten a lot of good ideas from early users on how to make digital libraries better. We hope this will make it unnecessary for research organizations to find and manage literature. Because if they can focus on their research, it’s not very Okay?”
