Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems have been notoriously user-unfriendly, with no perceived value to reader. But new applications are evolving. In an announcement this week, Elsevier has licensed RapidRights from Cadmus Communications to manage their sales of electronic reprints of health science journal articles. Sales of article reprints from major peer review journals is an attractive business, and Elsevier has prestigious titles, including The Lancet and the American Journal of Cardiology. Another publisher, the American Medical Association, receives significant revenue from print individual articles from its flagship title, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association). These articles are used as sales and customer service collateral by pharmaceutical and medical equipment manufacturers. The process is clunky, as is all print sales collateral. However, as described in DRM Watch, the RapidRights approach is based on the purchase of a fixed number of copies, and the download simply decrements a counter of the copies. No registration is required, and no plug-ins --both major drawbacks of other DRM approaches, and the format is standard PDF.

Medical content is rapidly becoming more electronic and readily accessible to medical professionals, with a PDA becoming standard equipment for younger doctors. Simplicity is the key to making this work, and this application meets that criteria. And the purchasers, those medical products companies buying reprints, will welcome faster and easier distribution!