Saving Money With Reprints Desk

There are a few universals in this world. We know everyone can count on death, taxes, and not having quite enough money in the budget to do all the things we want to do. It is because of this third point that it is very important to find ways to save money in your department. One way we have been able to cut costs at Cal Poly SLO is to use Reprints Desk as a means of lowering copyright cost. 

As you know copyright payments can be very expensive, often costing thousands of dollars a year for each Resource Sharing department. In late August our Resource Sharing department at Cal Poly started using Reprints Desk. We installed the ILLiad add on and started checking the price of any item needing copyright payment through the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). If the item is cheaper through Reprints Desk we request it through the add on, and will most likely receive it within the next ten minutes. 

It’s all well and good to say we saved money, but how much money? We started using Reprints Desk in late August and have tracked the price we paid Reprints Desk and how much we would have paid through CCC. This let us know how much money we saved each month. In August we saved $80.50, in September $490.80, and lastly we saved $265.90 in October. This means we have saved a total of $837.20 in a little over 2 months and a week! Not too shabby. 

-Chris Lee, CPS