When choosing software to help with accessing and sharing scientific content, a company must account for all the concerns it would when making any other decision — time, quality, cost, and the business needs it is trying to address.
The two specific criteria I believe are most important to discuss in this case are value and responsiveness. These criteria are not unique to small companies, but they are likely a much higher priority for smaller companies than they are for medium-size and large ones.
Small companies tend to have finite funding. They have X amount of dollars until the next financing round, and they don’t have revenue streams from market drugs that they can rely on year-to-year.
That said, these smaller companies also have a shorter runway to show success and they tend to have ambitious project timelines. I love a dynamic and agile culture, which leads to the second critical criteria, which is responsiveness.
To survive, smaller companies must often demonstrate success more quickly so they can raise more money to keep operating. They need to maintain a culture of innovation, and any solution they implement must be very responsive. These companies don’t have time to waste, and when it comes to finding scientific content, ideally, they would send their employees to a single source where they can search for whatever articles they may need. Once key articles are found, there should be an easy way to order that content, as simple as one button an employee could press to get it.
Features to Look for in a Scientific Content Solution
An ideal content solution would include the ability to check automatically, before purchase, whether articles requested by employees are already available through the company’s journal subscriptions. If so, it should be straightforward for employees to download this content without additional costs. Perhaps the article is not part of an existing subscription, but another employee has already purchased it. In this case, it should be easy for the article to be downloaded again by other employees without paying for it again.
Once employees have these articles, the best solution would also cover sharing this content as needed with their colleagues. Centralized storage where all purchased content is available would make sharing easiest, letting an employee quickly share content with other team members or even their full department, when it’s copyright compliant to do so.
This type of storage solution is also perfect for onboarding new employees. Instead of tasking them with looking for articles to read, they can be directed to this shared folder where a curated content collection already exists. Additionally, a storage solution like this would also make life easier for those who are involved with publication planning, manuscript preparation, and submitting to regulatory agencies.
The bottom line for small companies is that a solution for acquiring and sharing scientific content should be as cost-effective and easy to use as possible, in large part because it allows their scientists to spend more of their time on value-added activities, like reading papers, tweaking and optimizing experiment procedures, and spending more time in the lab, instead of chasing down articles they need.
CCC recently sat down with Doreen P. Alberts, a consultant with over 30 years of drug development experience, for a discussion on how smaller life science companies can improve the way their employees search for and utilize the scientific content that helps power their innovation. You can watch the full conversation here. Learn about CCC’s solutions for small life sciences companies here.