Try Before You Buy: Rent Journal Articles

Here's a scenario that nearly every scientific researcher is familiar with:

1. You conduct a painstaking search for peer-reviewed articles on PubMed, Google Scholar, or any number of databases.
2. You find potentially relevant journal articles and read the abstracts.
3. The article seems relevant to your study, but when you try to access the full-text articles online, you discover that you don't have a subscription to the necessary science journals. And the papers are not available via open access. If you want the articles, you'll have to purchase them. Problem is, you can't tell for certain from the abstract which articles, if any, will be useful and relevant.

You're faced with a tough choice. Do you purchase the article and hope it's relevant? Or do you pass on the purchase in order to conserve your content acquisition budget?

Good news: There's a third option that lets you have your cake and eat it, too (or rather, access your articles and conserve money, too).

Renting Full-Text Articles

Rentals are a relatively new method for accessing peer-reviewed articles inexpensively—and avoiding the risk of disappointing article purchases.

When you rent a journal article:

• you'll typically pay about 75% less than the purchase price;
• you'll have online access to the full-text articles for a specified amount of time;
• and if you ultimately decide to buy the article, the rental fee will be applied to the purchase price

It's important to note that rentals are for individual use only—which means you won't be able to download or share the PDF.

Overall, however, adding rentals to your content acquisition mix can help you better manage your scientific literature budget—only paying the full purchase price for articles you know will be useful. From a survey of 500 citations, for example, you might typically down-select to 100 articles of interest. Instead of buying all 100, you can rent them at a significantly reduced cost, assess the value of each article—and then make well-informed purchasing decisions.

Another benefit of renting is that it allows you to widen your net—and capture a greater number of relevant sources, at minimal cost. In short, rentals remove the guesswork by allowing you to “try before you buy.”

Ready to give rentals a try? Article Galaxy offers 3-day, full-text article rentals from top journal publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Informa. Click here for all the details.