How do you manage literature procurement without impeding the research process? How can you save time without wasting money? Librarians and information managers at research-driven organizations are routinely confronted with these questions. The answers aren't simple nor straightforward, but a solution that gets brought up is to centralize or de-centralize control over these research-related activities.
In scientific literature procurement, a company may benefit from a decentralized system that gives individual scientists control over their research workflows. Our Article Galaxy on-demand document delivery engine, for example, gives researchers the freedom to search for—and immediately access—the articles they need—which in turn, improves research efficiency.
However, decentralization can cause issues in other areas of knowledge management—especially in cost-efficiency, article sharing, and copyright compliance. In the absence of a centralized asset management system, it's difficult for scientists to determine whether they already have access to an article they want to obtain. Has someone else in the organization previously purchased the article? If so, can it be legally shared? Is the article accessible through the company’s subscription? Manually checking around to see if an article is legally accessible for free slows down the research efficiency.
A centralized system that enables users to share individual articles and subscription access offers valuable cost-saving benefits. At the same time, however, it makes compliance even more complex. Access to an article doesn’t always guarantee the appropriate rights for its intended purpose. The fine print of re-use rights depend on how the paper will be used. Is the use case within or outside the organization? Is it in response to a medical affairs inquiry? Or is it for a marketing or commercial function? For admin staff, it can take a lot of effort to decipher all the fine print for each article. But leaving compliance up to individual researchers is riskier still.
To optimize end-to-end efficiency, many information management teams opt for a hybrid approach, carefully balancing the benefits and pitfalls of centralization and decentralization for various uses.
At Research Solutions, we understand how hard it can be to empower your scientists and researchers with control over their workflows, while maintaining control over your rights management solution. With Article Galaxy, you have a single location to place all of your organization’s legally acquired PDF articles—making it easy for scientists to search for full-text papers. Importantly, it automatically checks for copyright permissions and re-use rights for content—incorporating your direct publisher agreements, Open Access content, and RRO license information—to enable a frictionless, cost-effective, and copyright compliant workflow.