Very interesting – I just found myself looking at an article in ScienceDirect, and was presented with a large panel touting an AI Reading Assistant, something I know we don’t subscribe to at the U of Calgary. I wondered if maybe we DID subscribe to it, but it hadn’t yet been announced. After signing in to my personal account, I noticed I was already down to 4 articles remaining until December 19, which certainly wasn’t a behaviour consistent with a subscription! I was then led to https://researcher.elsevier.com/, which was first captured by the Wayback Machine last month, on October 7, 2025.
There, I find that I can personally subscribe to ScienceDirect AI for US $25 / month or US $249 / year. There’s also a link to get in touch with sales for institutional access; I wonder how many hits that gets.
The FAQs go on to explain that purchasing SDAI won’t actually get you access to any additional content you don’t currently have. “Access to underlying content depends on your institution’s existing ScienceDirect subscriptions or any individual content purchases you make.” And, “…you can use ScienceDirect AI’s features regardless of your institution’s content access. However, the Reading Assistant tool is only available on documents you are entitled to access.” So that’s a strange potential mish-mash of institutional and personal accounts.
Do any other academic vendors market services directly to the end user? I can’t recall seeing anything like this before!
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