ScienceDirect
ScienceDirect is a website which provides subscription-based access to a large database of scientific and medical research. It hosts over 12 million pieces of content from 3,500 academic journals and 34,000 e-books.Usage
The journals are grouped into four main sections: Physical Sciences and Engineering, Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Social Sciences and Humanities. Article abstracts are freely available, but access to their full texts generally requires a subscription or pay-per-view purchase.
Subscriptions to the overall offering hosted on ScienceDirect, rather than to specific titles it carries, are usually acquired through a so called big deal. The other big five have similar offers.
ScienceDirect also competes for audience with other large aggregators and hosts of scholarly communication content such as academic social network ResearchGate and open access repository arXiv, as well as with fully open access publishing venues and megajournals like PLOS.Background
ScienceDirect is operated by the Anglo-Dutch publisher Elsevier. It was launched in March 1997.
