Q&A with Scott Ahlberg, Reprints Desk
Jinfo Blog

By Robin Neidorf

Item

Reprints Desk, a top-rated provider of document delivery services and management systems, recently announced a new partnership with the Copyright Clearance Center to become an authorised sales representative for CCC's Rightsphere copyright management system. The partnership brings together two complementary businesses and offers customers of both the opportunity to streamline the process of requesting, delivering and reusing copyright-protected content as flexibly and efficiently as possible. While cost savings are part of the equation, equally important is the potential for companies to reduce the risks associated with accidental misuse of content and improve workers' ability to interact with content.

Both Reprints Desk and CCC are sponsors of FreePint Research: Copyright Policies and Practices. Over the past few years, VIP has covered CCC regularly, including an in-depth review of Rightsphere in VIP Magazine back in April 2007. We now want to raise awareness of the other half of the partnership, through an interview with Scott Ahlberg, Head of Corporate Services for Reprints Desk.

VIP: Tell us a bit about how Reprints Desk and CCC came together in this partnership.

Scott Ahlberg: It really was our customers who brought us together.  Customers would ask us, ‘Why can't these steps be more integrated?' and very quickly we and CCC realised that there was an opportunity for both of us to improve the quality of service through partnership.

So our first step was to work on some integrations: Customers who had both the Reprints Desk document delivery and management systems and a Rightsphere license would work with us so that we could create a seamless integration between the two. 

The interesting thing is that the value to customers is even greater than we had anticipated. At first we thought it was primarily about mere convenience. But through some of these integrations, we realised that scientists and staff need to have timely access to understandable copyright information. No one gives scientists copyright training when they leave academia and go into corporate settings. 

VIP: As a leader in workflow integration, Reprints Desk must understand a great deal about the customer, what they need and what they're doing with the content. Many businesses struggle with the technology question: Build it internally or partner? You opted for partnership, although you probably could have tried to build the capabilities yourself. Why?

SA: It's a great question - it always is one of the central questions. Partnering with the best is better than building it yourself.

It's important to recognise the history and depth of CCC: To provide document delivery, we work closely with a lot of publishers, but no matter how many publishers we work with, CCC has a 30-year head-start on us and we'd never catch up to that. Nor would we really want to. Beyond the technology, there's an enormous amount of expertise that goes into making sure copyright information is exactly right. That's what CCC and Rightsphere do. 

What Reprints Desk does, on the other hand, is to get embedded into the mindset and workflow of the customer, and build document delivery around that understanding. 

Of course, as soon as a customer gets their hands on a document, the next question is usually, ‘OK, what can I do next with this content? What will it cost me to do it, and how do I go about it?' They might need 10 copies of an article for a conference, or they want to share it with colleagues at their location or somewhere else, or they want to add it to a digital repository. And there's Rightsphere to make it simple. It's really a beautifully complementary partnership.

VIP: What's your strategy on bringing the integrated solution to customers? How do you identify a good candidate for Reprints Desk?

SA: We first started working with CCC a year and a half ago to provide Rightsphere to current and new Reprints Desk customers. We're now starting the work of understanding how we can offer the value of the integrated solution to the broader market.  

A good candidate company is one in which inefficient or redundant workflows can be eliminated. A lot of organisations are pushing more research and document requests to the desktop to streamline the process, free up information professionals for higher-value work, and reduce costs. If end users are ordering and receiving articles directly, then they are likely to be a good candidate to look at a workflow solution like Reprints Desk with Rightsphere. 

We take a service-based approach to working with customers. Because Reprints Desk is all about the content workflow, we take a very close look at the workflow of every customer to thoroughly understand it. Where are the citations coming from? Who's doing the ordering?  

We then inquire with the company whether or not they already have a CCC license to cover their content usage. If they have the CCC license, then in all likelihood the small cost to add Rightsphere will be of great value to them.

Finally, we ask a lot of questions about what they do with the articles after we deliver. For example, are they creating their own digital repositories? If managed properly with a CCC license, then they can assemble a digital repository legally, and we can help ensure everything is handled properly.

VIP: What do you see as the role of Reprints Desk and Rightsphere in helping companies manage the risks associated with copyright?

SA: The global aspects of copyright are particularly challenging. Once upon a time, the many offices of a multinational pharmaceutical company would each have been acquiring and using content on their own. Given the distance and the limitations of paper-based resources, there wasn't as much of an alternative, or an opportunity to create problems. 

Now this has changed. It's easier than ever to share or reuse or repurpose content, and we don't really know what our offices in another country or state are doing. Naturally, there's a major concern about creating liability for the company as a whole. 

I read a piece published in VIP on copyright that said, â€˜Information managers can't be copyright enforcers.' That's true. But what information managers can do is be an advocate for educating their workforce. They can ensure that workers have the appropriate tools and information to minimise risk.       

« Blog