A little while ago I received a phone call from Darlene Nowak at San Diego State University. She knew Cal Poly, like San Diego, was using Reprints Desk to save money on copyright. Darlene thought it would be a good idea for our statistics to be shared with members of the ILL community so together we made a poster presentation for the International ILLiad Conference in Virginia Beach.
Cal Poly SLO started using Reprints Desk on August 28, 2015. To find out how much money we were saving using both Reprints Desk and the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) we created a spreadsheet showing the prices we paid Reprints Desk and what we would have paid using just the CCC. Between August and Dec 31st Cal Poly spent $2,031.40 less than we would have if we stuck to only using the CCC. We still use the CCC for articles that are cheaper through their service.
Another Benefit to using Reprints Desk is the speed of delivery. As we all know articles requests can take awhile to arrive. We request it from a string of libraries and every library on the string has several days to fill the article, meaning articles can take hours to weeks to arrive. At Cal Poly SLO 92% of the articles we requested arrived within an hour. It seemed like most of these articles actually arrived in less than 10 minutes but the statistics provided by Reprints Desk measures by the hour.
The statistics provided by Darlene Nowak showed similar results at San Diego State University (SDSU). SDSU used Reprints Desk along with mediated Get It Now through all of 2015. Since Cal Poly SLO has yet to use Get It Now only the Reprints Desk numbers were used in this presentation, we felt it was appropriate to compare apples to apples and not apples to apples AND oranges. San Diego saved an estimated $3,699.66 and received 85% of their articles in under an hour with Reprints Desk in all of 2015.
Intergalactic Loan 