To Mediate or Not to Mediate: A Modern Take on Article Access
Knowledge management is critical to the success of any research-driven organization. But like everything else in a successful enterprise, streamlining operations is essential. That goes for managing access to scientific literature as well.
Today, many pharmaceutical and biotech companies are streamlining their operations by giving their researchers and scientists direct, unmediated access to scholarly journal content. In other words, they are implementing solutions that take the middleman out of the equation. But in doing so, are they taking knowledge management out of the loop? Not by a longshot!
For an unmediated access process to work effectively, knowledge management professionals need assurances that the system won’t be abused. They need to know, for example, that all users are authenticated—and that all activity is tracked. It’s also important for them to have complete visibility into all transactions, down to the article level and the department that ordered it. Indeed, although the article acquisition process would happen behind the scenes, knowledge management professionals would need to be the first to know whenever mediation or intercession were required. With those assurances in place, document delivery services can become routine, automatic, and transparent.
Automate Document Delivery with Article Galaxy
The quality of your organization’s access to content shouldn’t be affected by time zones, odd working hours, or geographic locations. Your offices and researchers on the opposite coast, or across the ocean, should be able to quickly access the scholarly articles they need, even if your workday has ended.
Article Galaxy is a cloud-based document delivery and literature management platform that lets you enjoy the benefits of unmediated access—while maintaining complete control over your literature management process. In this system, your users can get the scholarly articles they want, at any time, without delay. Orders are filled automatically and immediately, and always in ways that obey the rules you’ve established.
Article Galaxy also helps you minimize your overall access costs. For example, it checks all requests against your journal subscriptions, ensuring you’ll never pay twice for the same article when appropriate reuse rights exist. It also surfaces the availability of open access articles and highlights the availability of article rentals. In short, it lets your users quickly obtain the articles they want in the most cost-efficient way possible—and always within the parameters you establish.
In addition to providing your users with instant, automated access to scientific literature, you can also rely on Research Solutions for expert help (from a real person, 24 hours a day) with whatever you need—whether it’s finding an elusive document, adding a service, or troubleshooting a configuration.
