For big pharma companies and small biotechs alike, it’s important to obtain peer-reviewed journal articles in the most cost-efficient way possible. Doing so, of course, requires strategic planning. To minimize your literature acquisition spending, you need to figure out the right balance between publisher subscriptions, token packages, open access, and individual article purchases. And don’t forget about article rentals.
When you rent an article, you’ll typically pay about 70% less than the purchase price. After the rental term is up, you can upgrade to a full purchase simply by paying the difference between the rental fee and the purchase price (in other words, the rental fees are credited toward your purchase). On the other hand, if you decide not to purchase the article, you can revel in the fact that you didn’t waste money buying an article that turned out not to be relevant, or that you no longer need. Seems like a win-win, right?
But there’s the catch! You may hit a tipping point with rentals, where instead of saving money, you’re throwing it away. Consider this scenario . . .
A scientist at your organization (let’s call her Person A) rents an article—and pays significantly less than she would have if she purchased it. After reading through the full-text article, she determines it’s not relevant to her study, so she doesn’t upgrade to a purchase. Renting turned out to be a wise, cost-saving choice! She was able to avoid paying the full purchase price for an article she didn’t need.
Some months later, another scientist at your organization (Person B) rents the same article. He doesn’t upgrade to purchase, either. At this point, the rental fees for Person A and Person B may still add up to less than the purchase price. Although your organization’s overall savings has diminished this time around due to the two rental fees, renting was still the cost-saving choice.
But if multiple people rent that same article, the combined payments will eventually exceed the purchase price—and the cost-saving benefit of renting will vanish. Moving forward, any additional rentals of that article will put you further in the hole.
Looking back over all these rental transactions, you see that your organization would have paid the lowest possible amount on that article if Person A had simply purchased it right off the bat—and the PDF was added to your company’s content repository.
But alas, hindsight is 20/20. Unless you have a crystal ball, there’s no way to predict how many times users across your organization will rent a particular article. So, how do you know when renting is the right choice?
At Research Solutions, we’ve developed a simple solution that ensures you never lose money on article rentals.
Duplicate Rental Avoidance is an Article Galaxy Enterprise feature that prevents account users from renting the same article multiple times. With this feature enabled, once an article has been rented on a particular account, the option to rent no longer appears. Rather than wasting money on duplicate rentals, the user will only see the option to purchase. Once the article has been purchased, the PDF will be freely available to all account users for future use (in accordance with its re-use rights).
