(13 September 2017) HighWire Press, Inc., the strategic partner and platform provider for world-leading scholarly publishers and societies, announces the platform-wide rollout of Campus-Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) on its Intelligent Platform, in cooperation with Google Scholar. CASA enables seamless off-campus and mobile access to subscribed scholarly content. With CASA, off-campus and mobile users may access their library’s subscriptions just as easily as when they are on campus.
Anurag Acharya, co-creator of Google Scholar, said, “CASA builds on Google Scholar’s Subscriber Links program which provides direct links in the search interface to subscribed collections for on-campus users. With CASA, a researcher can start a literature survey on campus and resume where she left off once she is home, or travelling, with no hoops to jump through. Her subscribed collections are highlighted in Google Scholar searches and she is able to access articles in exactly the same way as on campus.”
John Sack, Founding Director of HighWire, spoke to both the need and the solution: “HighWire identified many frustrating steps to get access to subscribed content outside the campus IP network in our analysis of friction in the researcher’s workflow. This leads some researchers to use Sci-Hub. We wanted to improve ease of access and worked with Google Scholar to implement their idea for CASA, building on our long-standing relationship. CASA is a brilliant and simple solution. The best part is the end user doesn’t have to change her workflow or learn anything new to get access.”
A faster, easier user experience to subscription content from publishers will help libraries serve their patrons and will provide researchers with legitimate access to authorized versions, without using Sci-Hub as a work around to off-campus barriers. CASA access is correctly attributed to the subscribing institution, so that COUNTER reporting reflect these new usage opportunities.
Nancy Rodnan, Senior Director of Publications at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), said “ASBMB is excited to give subscribers faster, reliable access to its journals through CASA, which will eliminate barriers to journal content hosted on the HighWire platform.”
HighWire will introduce CASA at Charleston and the STM London Innovation meetings later this year. CASA supports industry-wide initiatives to improve access to resources while maintaining requirements of licensing agreements and copyright laws.
The announcement is here.
