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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 5th September 2019 – Knowledge E, the developers of Zendy, partnered with EBSCO to provide content to individuals in 17 countries. With the hope of bringing all academic literature to one accessible space, Zendy aims to become the information watering hall for all academic and non-academic professionals, students and laymen across the world. Zendy’s mission is to build a movement towards a more knowledgeable world by making scholarly information readily accessible and affordable to everyone. This means anyone with a problem can turn to their laptop, log into Zendy, and find scientific research to back their decision making and support their research.

“Zendy aims to democratise access to scientific content traditionally trapped behind paywalls and less accessible. With the rise of simple yet illegal ways of access to scientific content, there has never been a time where simple, affordable, and legal ways access to content, has been more needed. This is a chance for all publishers and content providers to join this journey and to increase their reach to more and more individuals beyond those only coming from elite institutions in some countries. We are happy that EBSCO shares our vision and look forward to working closely with them on this ambitious yet achievable goal.” – Founder and CEO of Knowledge E, Kamran R. Kardan.

The Regional Vice President of EBSCO Information Services, Ali Abdullah, added:

“EBSCO’s aim is to deliver information to all. Having the ability to reach and access information is one of the rights of every human being. EBSCO uses all possible technologies and platforms to deliver its shared knowledge and accomplish the goal of making information accessible to all. The collaboration with Knowledge E on Zendy is an important step in that direction.

Zendy is like the digital store where researches and readers can have access to their dreamland of resources, it will allow them to have a direct channel to the latest academic information without any intermediaries.

Zendy aims to fill the gap between researchers and their entities concerning lack of access, missing data and the absence of resources from time to time. Having access to Zendy is a personal investment which researchers and professionals should not omit. Access to relevant knowledge gives researchers the ability to grow, get promoted, have a better reputation and a higher credibility and thus aim for greater life achievements.”

Amidst the freedom to explore all relevant scholarly content through one powerful literature platform, Zendy’s team additionally aspires to strengthen the research community by building new collaborations and partnerships amongst the global academic family to enrich the content available through Zendy and enhance the end-user experience.

Visit Zendy Collaboration for Publishers to register interest and take a step towards building a more knowledgeable world.

About 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.

Zendy is developed by Knowledge E in a growing collaboration with researchers, students, institutions and publishers. Zendy invites, in particular, all publishers to join the collaboration to support the vision for Zendy. 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 is key to learning and a better quality of life.

About Knowledge E

Established in 2012, Knowledge E’s name was fast to become synonymous with collaboration, professionalism and innovation. Head-quartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and supported by a team of 30 highly engaged professionals, Knowledge E works closely with over 100 clients world-wide from various types of organisations and government entities within the research and education sector to support their continued innovation and development. This is achieved by providing leading expertise, information resources and software solutions.

Since its inception, Knowledge E has prudently expanded its expertise, services and technology in line with its vision of developing ‘a more knowledgeable world’. Knowledge E’s three core offerings are the 3D’s; ‘Discover’, ‘Develop’ and ‘Disseminate’. ‘Discover’ through the KnE Digital Library Solutions powered by Zendy for research literature discovery, as well as tailored content packages; ‘Develop’ through the KnE Learning Programmes, supporting capacity building and skills development within academia as well as the KnE Consulting Projects, serving universities on their mission to become ‘world-class universities’; and ‘Disseminate’ through the KnE Publishing Services and the platform for Open Access publishing of regional journals and conference proceedings.

About EBSCO

EBSCO is the leading provider of research databases, e-journals, magazine subscriptions, e-books and discovery service to libraries of all kinds. For over 70 years,  we’ve partnered with libraries to improve research with quality content and technology.

EBSCO Information Services is a division of EBSCO Industries, Inc., one of the largest privately held and family-owned companies in the United States. EBSCO Industries, Inc. has been in business since 1944. Starting out as a small subscription agency, EBSCO quickly became a pioneer in the library services industry. Through vision, action and innovation, EBSCO invests in the library business to ensure the long-term growth of products, services and technologies for our customers.

With today’s release, your user profile has been extended to include information on your role, main area of interest and your country of residence. This may seem like a small thing, but will enable us in a later step to serve you much more relevant content and recommendations.

Your user profile becomes through this release also an important instrument for us to prioritise what content to add, and what features to focus on to provide you with a continuously improved experience when using Zendy.

Don’t hesitate to contact us with any comments or questions!

In the latest release of Zendy, you now have access to permanent links to records that have a natural unique identifier, like an ISBN-number or a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

Just click the link symbol after the author names next to the title to copy the link. You can then share it per email or in social media to let others directly access (upon login) the article you have found.

The week of 22–28 October is the International Open Access Week (#OAweek), which Zendy and Knowledge E will celebrate with you by highlighting different Open Access initiatives and perspectives.

Open Access has stepwise gained significance and momentum since its inception in the 1990s as a model for publishing research findings in a barrier-free way. Over the last few years, Open Access has been accelerated by global government initiatives to increase public accessibility to publicly funded research. The European Commission is pursuing an ambitious plan to move publicly funded research into a culture of Open Science as laid out in several initiatives, for example, as part of the Work Programme ‘Science with and for Society’ of Horizon 2020, and the lately taken ground-breaking step through ‘Plan S’.

However, the Open Access initiatives don’t stop at Europe’s borders, and the benefits to openly accessible data to stimulate collaboration and discovery are globally known, and perhaps most felt in developing countries where paid content commonly is not affordable to institutions.

Several scholarly, diamond Open Access journals and over 1,500 conference papers are now available on Knowledge E’s ‘KnE Publishing Platform’, which is a significant contribution to the developing countries’ knowledge infrastructure, and is benefitting the academic community worldwide by ensuring visibility of regional findings.

This month, Knowledge E has gone a step further in democratising access to knowledge by announcing the beta release of Zendy with the aim to provide academic literature at your fingertips. Zendy already provides access to an impressive 20,000 peer-reviewed journals and over 100 million publication records available as Open Access.

The beta-release almost coincides with the International Open Access Week, a reminder of the importance of free-for-all data of high value. The Open Access Week initiative offers a video archive, which gives glimpses into the merits of Open Access globally: www.openaccessweek.org/video

Knowledge E celebrates the International Open Access Week through daily social media feeds showcasing the company’s Open Access initiatives through a prism of vantage points.

Frankfurt Book Fair – FRANKFURT, Germany, 11th October 2018 – Zendy has been created with the aim to radically facilitate access to academic literature; it sees the light today in the form of a beta release. Zendy has been developed by Knowledge E in a growing collaboration with academic researchers, students, institutions and publishers.

“By addressing the key challenges that we face through traditional ways of accessing academic literature, Zendy serves to provide peace of mind, a zen day, for all researchers and students”, says Kamran Kardan, CEO at Knowledge E.

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.

Martin Jagerhorn, Chief Innovation Officer at Knowledge E, outlines the objectives of Zendy in more detail. “We have set out to ensure that Zendy provides an outstanding user experience. Typically, there is a complex path towards the full text – going across different sites and several clicks before you can finally download the full-text article. Our ambition is to ensure that the full-text material can be accessed directly for all articles on Zendy. Currently, we have only achieved this for a small fraction of the publication records.”

Dr. Tanguy Pierog, who is a Particle Physics Researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and a part of the beta users providing input to the development process, explains that: “You feel that this new service has been designed in close collaboration with the research community. Zendy is already incredibly intuitive and easy to use, and will save us valuable time for accessing relevant literature and let us focus more on the actual research.”

Furthermore, 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.

The third pillar of Zendy, next to an outstanding user experience and high-quality content, is to offer an affordable access to paid 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. Martin adds: “We invite all publishers to join the collaboration to support the vision for Zendy as we believe this will be important to academics globally, but particularly in developing countries, where universities commonly cannot afford to subscribe to many of the key databases required for quality research and studies. Zendy will in this way facilitate the democratization of access to knowledge, which we know is key to learning”.

Even without the paid content, Zendy realizes 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.

About Knowledge E

Established in 2012, Knowledge E’s name was fast to become synonymous with collaboration, professionalism and innovation. Head-quartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and supported by a team of 30 highly engaged professionals, Knowledge E works passionately with all types of organisations and government entities within the research and education sector to support their continued innovation and development by providing them with leading expertise, information resources and software solutions. Knowledge E’s three core offerings are the 3D’s; ‘Discover’, ‘Develop’ and ‘Disseminate’. ‘Discover’ through the KnE Digital Library Solutions for research literature discovery, ‘Develop’ through the KnE Learning Services, supporting capacity building and skills development within academia and ‘Disseminate’ through the KnE Publishing Services and the platform for Open Access publishing and indexing of regional journals and conference proceedings. www.knowledgee.com