This would be a market option that would allow players to buy artifacts or research points for credits based on their rank. The cost in credits would be equal to the artifact points to find multiplied by their rank.
Buying an artifact would then double its cost (subsequent buys will double it again IE. 4k would become 8k would become 16k) After a cool down (3-6 hours) the cost would begin to lower itself by 10% until it reached its base cost again after 13-16 hours.
There would be an unlocking cost for certain artifacts before they could even be accessed. These costs would be fixed but the artifacts themselves would still scale.
Certain artifacts (helms men, rescued prisoners ect) would only occasionally appear (in similar fashion to NPC's only sensors and cloaking dont affect when they would appear) to prevent abuse.

Research would work in a similar fashion. Players would be able to buy research points in a specific tech. The cost would scale depending on the tech as well as a players level. A player buying level 3 armor tech at rank 200 will find it ultra cheap making it a good idea to buy instead of wasting their own research points on them where a level 7 weapon tech for a rank 50 will be very expensive making it cheaper to wait for their research to build up.

At certain times different techs will have galactic breakthroughs lowering the tech cost for all players if they buy using credits. This will however only be for a set amount of research points and only last a few hours so that players can not abuse the "sale".

This would give players another way to play as well as increase the incentive of doing credit based reward missions.