Commercial document delivery suppliers
The resource sharing landscape has recently seen the growth of a number of third party content aggregators providing document delivery services to libraries. These aggregators work across publishers to provide direct end-user ordering of articles / chapters delivered digitally direct to customers. Prevalent in commercial research libraries, these providers offer advantages in terms of customer ease of access by providing a request interface analogous with the discovery experience to access internal collections. Typically users search for the article they wish to access via a simple search interface, submit an online order and receive un-encrypted documents direct to their email inbox.
Examples of such services include:
However, such services come at a significant cost overhead as the business model for such services is usually a combination of a subscription cost (dependent on user numbers) and / or payment of publication specific copyright fees. For many publishers, working with such aggregators provides another means of driving access to their content in addition to direct article sales via their own platforms.
Due to high subscription costs and the payment of copyright fees on requests, such services may be cost prohibitive to higher education institutions. As of 2024, Elsevier do not provide their content via DeepDyve leaving a significant gap in their holdings.