How Some Researchers Are Managing Journal Access Costs In Lean Times

When bioinformatician Dan Morgan finished his Ph.D. program and joined a small startup, he was surprised to find that leaving university meant leaving something else behind—easy access to peer-reviewed literature. “I used to be able to use my school’s library to find whatever I needed,” he says. “But my company doesn’t have the budget to buy subscriptions to dozens of journals. Now when I need to look at an article, I have to search all over to try to find a way to read it.”

This challenge is faced daily by many researchers who have gone to work at startups or other smaller organizations. Finding a way to do the systematic literature reviews needed for regulatory requirements—or even just keep up-to-date on their fields—can require spending time scouring the web, spending lots of money, or both.

Some researchers even end up taking on adjunct roles or hiring university-affiliated interns just to get access to papers—without realizing that it can present a dilemma. Often the articles that are downloaded through an academic library are not licensed for commercial purposes, so using them in that way can create legal risk.

William Park, CEO of literature platform DeepDyve, has heard all this before—many times.

“There are a lot of products on the market designed for large institutional libraries,” says Park. “And there are a lot of products designed for individual researchers. But after talking with our users, we saw a clear, unmet need for the tens of thousands of organizations in the middle: small to medium-sized companies that still need to access and manage literature from many different publishers, but don’t have massive budgets for it—especially in the funding environment we are seeing currently.”

From these conversations was born LitHub: a platform that is designed to make it easy and affordable for research organizations to discover, access, organize, and collaborate on peer-reviewed papers. It’s an innovation that was over a decade in the making.

“We’ve been around since 2011,” says Park. “We were founded by two guys in this exact situation—scientists who had just graduated and went to work for small companies and couldn’t believe how hard it suddenly was to find papers.” Park and his team, inspired by the changes that streaming music and video services had brought to digital media, decided to see if they could apply that same model to peer-reviewed journals.

“We started meeting with publishers to bring this new idea to them: a service where users could read articles online for a flat monthly fee rather than purchasing and downloading individual articles.” Publishers—like Springer Nature, Wiley, and The New England Journal of Medicine —signed on, and the users followed. And then something unexpected happened.

“When we first started, our users were individual researchers. Then as our full-text collection grew past fifteen million articles or so, we started to see users ask us for group plans they could use for their whole team. That’s when we realized there was a larger need out there.” And when they talked to users, they heard that just accessing papers was only part of the battle.

“The most common complaint we heard, over and over, was that there is a tremendous amount of wasted time and money trying to find papers, a lot of what they find has iffy copyright-compliance, and it’s virtually impossible to share or collaborate with colleagues. And of course there’s the big question mark around AI.” says Park. “So we built LitHub to be a one-stop platform that allows researchers to find and access any paper, including ones that the organization has already purchased, all from one place, and easily organize and collaborate on those papers and explore them with AI.”

Complexity also came up in how easy it was to install and maintain tools. “Our IT team has its hands full already,” says researcher Morgan. “So many of the things we looked at required a lot of set up and maintenance; we don’t have the time or the resources for that.” DeepDyve designed LitHub to be fully cloud-based, with no setup or ongoing maintenance required.

So how has the response been? “We’ve had companies look at a ten-minute demo and sign on right away,” says Park. “It’s really incredible how huge the demand is for something that solves these problems that organizations have had for years. And today more than ever people are looking for ways to be more efficient with their budgets. We want this to be something that makes finding and managing literature something research organizations don’t even have to think about anymore. Because wouldn’t it be great if they could just focus on their research?”