According to a recent Fierce Pharma report, mergers and acquisition (M&A) deals are surging in biopharma, with the value of the top 10 M&A transactions in 2023 totaling over $115 billion. This sum far exceeds those of the past few years.
While it’s always important for organizations to properly manage their scientific content, this is especially true when M&A deals are set in motion. These transactions are intended to speed up innovation—needing to dedicate resources during this crucial time to shoring up how scientific content is managed can bog down teams.
Below are seven key considerations that companies should keep in mind when undergoing one of these transactions.
- Know what employees need ahead of a merger or acquisition.
Maintaining an up-to-date list of which publisher subscriptions a company holds can make content needs easier to assess and meet after an M&A transaction. Companies often need to make decisions fast about which users will need access to which content in the future.
For example, during an acquisition, a company with access to more resources may need to make decisions about which subscriptions to expand to cover new employees and then to negotiate those extensions to their subscriptions with publishers. Knowing ahead of time where employees are getting content from and how much is being spent on this content can streamline the negotiation process. The time and effort needed to bring together this content usage information can be reduced with a budgeting tool such as RightFind Business Intelligence, which not only provides content usage insights but also helps model different budgeting scenarios so you can make data-driven decisions.
- Know how to keep access available during a merger or acquisition.
In another common scenario, merging companies may have subscriptions with the same providers for different sets of content. Since content providers typically control access to their content via IP address, merging companies will likely have to work with publishers to ensure that employees who switch IP address still have access to all the content they need.
When using IP addresses to control which employees have access to subscribed content, those who manage content access should work closely with their company’s IT team as IT infrastructure can play an crucial role in successfully navigating the content usage demands created by M&A deals.
To make work between content managers and IT teams easier during an M&A transaction, companies utilizing RightFind Enterprise can take advantage of RightFind Passport to keep users ‘tied’ to recognized, static IP addresses for content access, allowing users to be recognized as authenticated employees regardless of the IP address their PC has been assigned.
- Track what has already been purchased—and who keeps access after the transaction.
Knowing the location of scientific literature that was already purchased is vital when a company needs to grant access to new employees, or to remove access for a group. If, after an M&A transaction, an organization’s content will need to be broadly available to all employees, is it stored in a system that can manage this level of access?
For smaller companies, using a platform that keeps all the content purchased by employees over the years accessible in one place can help being acquired go more smoothly. With content centrally located, a company can assess more quickly which content is available, who has access to it, and what can be shared with new colleagues.
- If possible, skip contracts that require seat-based licensing.
As an M&A transaction approaches, organizations using document delivery solutions with seat-based licensing will need to manage who already has seats, who needs seats, which seats can be reassigned and how many more seats to buy. This can be an expensive and time-consuming process, especially for smaller companies with limited resources. Choosing a vendor that can offer affordable, scalable, enterprise-wide licensing helps content managers avoid this potential headache.
- Pay extra attention to your onboarding plan.
Companies entering an M&A deal should also consider their onboarding plans for new employees. By choosing widely used, industry-standard software, companies can improve the chances that new employees will already be familiar with how they access and manage scientific content, decreasing onboarding time overall.
Even when new employees are not familiar with the tools being used, companies can still find a vendor who can help with training new employees and who can offer advice on best practices for finding and using scientific content, including copyright compliance, to help shorten onboarding time after a merger or acquisition.
- Don’t let a lack of copyright compliance become a blocker.
Speaking of copyright compliance, there’s no better time for an organization to be sure it’s up to speed in this area than ahead of an M&A transaction. During M&A due diligence, larger companies will likely examine many regulatory and compliance aspects of the deal, including those involving copyright.
Commonly shared “horror stories” around M&A transactions concern researchers at a startup company still using their academic credentials to access scientific literature, or regularly engaging in various other non-compliant practices such as sharing content they’re not entitled to share. To prevent copyright from becoming a blocker for a successful merger or acquisition, companies can adopt a copyright policy that is shared with all employees. This can be made easier with a copyright license from CCC, as well as literature management software like RightFind that provides a single place to access critical scientific articles while taking the guesswork out of copyright compliance.
You can read more about the importance of copyright compliance for small businesses here.
- Don’t overlook the importance of process.
The ability to easily find, acquire, and manage scientific content is as important as the content itself. By establishing an efficient process around its use of scientific literature, an organization, especially a smaller one, can send good signals to a partner in an M&A deal and help make the merger or acquisition that much easier to complete. For guidance on investing in a literature management system, check out our tips on the most important things to consider during your search.
Whether you are looking to refine your workflow around scientific literature or to design one from scratch, if your company is entering an M&A deal, you don’t have to go it alone and can partner with a literature management vendor that has a proven track record of helping to manage these potentially complex transactions. At CCC, we’ve worked with hundreds of life science and pharmaceutical clients undergoing their own mergers and acquisitions, and we’ve developed software that helps make these transactions easier for companies. Contact us now to learn more.