Welcome to Zendy!

Zendy has been created with the aim to radically facilitate access to academic literature. By addressing the key challenges that we face with traditional ways for finding relevant, high-quality, academic content, Zendy serves to provide peace of mind, a zen day, for all researchers and students.

Many academics feel the opposite of zen on most days – overwhelmed by the sheer availability of knowledge hidden in not-so-easily-accessible nooks and crannies of the vast body of academic publishing output, unable to retrieve just that one piece of available quality research that solves a problem, enables a discovery, enlightens a hungry mind, broadens horizons, opens new doors and – a bit further down the line – changes the world for the better. Pitfalls are plenty, many of which revolve around discoverability, reliability and trustworthiness of sources.

To address these challenges, Zendy sets out to:

• Provide an outstanding user experience. Typically, there is a complex path towards the full text – going across different sites and several clicks before you eventually can download the full-text article. Our ambition is to ensure that the full-text material can be accessed directly for all articles on Zendy, though for the moment, we have only achieved this for a small fraction of the publication records.
• Ensure the content is reliable and of high quality. The content will be reviewed based on a set of quality criteria to ensure that it is reliable and of high quality, in particular, making sure that there will be no content from any predatory publishers. This is a major undertaking, which will take time before it becomes available on Zendy, but it will be crucial for researchers and students to fully trust the content and be able to progress their work more effectively.
• Offer an affordable access to key content. While the Open Access material will stay free for everyone on Zendy, the ambition is to enable anyone to access paid content for a modest subscription fee through Zendy Premium. We believe this will be important particularly in developing countries, where universities commonly cannot afford many of the subscription databases required for advancing research and studies effectively, not to forget, individuals worldwide that are not affiliated with any subscribing institution.

Even without the paid content, Zendy shares the dormant power in openly accessible research that might not quite have made its way to end users in all its vastness until now. Already containing more than 100 million publications from over 20,000 peer-reviewed journals, Zendy channels this impressive quantity of data to anyone and anywhere, and to be consumed online or be downloaded.

Zendy is developed by Knowledge E in a growing collaboration with researchers, students, institutions and publishers. We invite in particular all publishers to join the collaboration to support the vision for Zendy as we believe this will be important to academics globally, and as said, particularly in developing countries. Zendy will in this way facilitate the democratization of access to knowledge, which we know is key to learning and a better quality of life.

Join us on the journey, and reach out to us for any kind of contribution by sending a message to hello@zendy.io.