Category Archives: oa.casa

HighWire at 25: Anurag Acharya (Google Scholar) looks back – Highwire Press

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“In the early 2000s, my role at Google was running web indexing: the system that crawls the web, making pages and content discoverable and accessible through search. Nowadays, there’s an assumption that looking for something via Google searches everything, but that wasn’t the case in the early days. Part of my role was to expand the index by reaching out to many different types of organizations – government, business, publishers – to make sure their web sites were included in the index.

A key group among these was scholarly publishers hosting journals and conferences. Having grown up on a university campus, scholarly articles had been all around and I wanted to make sure that they were as easy to find as everything else.

As a part of this, I reached out to HighWire to explore the possibility of indexing the hosted journals. I remember our first call in the Fall of 2002 with John Sack, Todd McGee and several others. A few quick calls, a couple of meetings in person and we were off….”

Improving access and delivery of academic content – a survey of current & emerging trends | Musings about librarianship

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“While allowing users to gain access to paywalled academic content aka delivery services is often seen to be less sexy than discovery it is still an important part of the researcher workflow that is worth looking at. In particular, I will argue that in the past few years we have seen a renewed interest in this part of the workflow and may potentially start to see some big changes in the way we provide access to academic content in the near future.

Note: The OA discovery and delivery front has changed a lot since 2017, with Unpaywall been a big part of the story, but for this blog post I will focus on delivery aspects of paywalled content. 1.0 Access and delivery – an age old problem

 

1.1 RA21, Seamless Access and getFTR

 

1.2 Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA)

1.3 Browser extensions/”Access Brokers” 1.4 Content syndication partnership between Springer Nature and ResearchGate (new) 1.5 Is the sun slowing setting on library link resolvers? 1.6 The Sci-hub effect?

1.7 Privacy implications …”

Improving access and delivery of academic content – a survey of current & emerging trends | Musings about librarianship

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“Some readers might be thinking that this might be a odd time for us to start focusing on improving user experiences with delivery given that the coming of open access might make a lot of this moot.

 

There are two answers to this. Firstly open access even in the most optimistic of projections will still have a decade or more to go and is likely to cover only journal articles. Libraries will still need to provide access to other licensed resources (A&I indexes, image archives etc) that will not be covered by Open Access.

 

The other reason is that some content providers even in a open access world would still want users to authenticate, so they can track usage and users.”

Improving access and delivery of academic content – a survey of current & emerging trends | Musings about librarianship

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“Some readers might be thinking that this might be a odd time for us to start focusing on improving user experiences with delivery given that the coming of open access might make a lot of this moot.

 

There are two answers to this. Firstly open access even in the most optimistic of projections will still have a decade or more to go and is likely to cover only journal articles. Libraries will still need to provide access to other licensed resources (A&I indexes, image archives etc) that will not be covered by Open Access.

 

The other reason is that some content providers even in a open access world would still want users to authenticate, so they can track usage and users.”

Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) – Highwire Press

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“HighWire and Google co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) as an authentication enhancement that improves the authentication for off-campus users of Google Scholar.  CASA is free and is automatically enabled for all HighWire-hosted Journals that are indexed in Google Scholar.

How does it work?

When a user is on-campus, they often connect to a University network. When connected, if they visit Google Scholar, Google automatically creates an affiliation between that user and their institution.  This affiliation allows Google Scholar to record that the user has subscription privileges granted by that institution. With Google CASA, this same seamless authentication follows the user when they take their device to any off-campus location.   Once the affiliation is created, it grants them immediate access to the articles and Journals that their institution subscribes to even when the user is off campus….”

Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) – Highwire Press

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“HighWire and Google co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) as an authentication enhancement that improves the authentication for off-campus users of Google Scholar.  CASA is free and is automatically enabled for all HighWire-hosted Journals that are indexed in Google Scholar.

How does it work?

When a user is on-campus, they often connect to a University network. When connected, if they visit Google Scholar, Google automatically creates an affiliation between that user and their institution.  This affiliation allows Google Scholar to record that the user has subscription privileges granted by that institution. With Google CASA, this same seamless authentication follows the user when they take their device to any off-campus location.   Once the affiliation is created, it grants them immediate access to the articles and Journals that their institution subscribes to even when the user is off campus….”