A belated look at Campus Activated Subscriber Access (CASA) or "off-campus access links" in Google Scholar

Back in Oct 2018 (I know because I searched my email), I was helping some third party test a browser extension that would provide links to free full text (somewhat akin to Unpaywall) and I came across this curious Dark Grey box with the words "PDF" at the side of a journal article.

Presence of a myserious Grey PDF box on the right side of the page

Curiously, it did not seem to be generated by the browser extension I was testing , nor was it generated by any of the other extensions I had tested before (e.g. Lean Library, Unpaywall etc).

Clicking on the PDF box, brought me to the same page with no access. I eventually shrugged my shoulder and concluded Wiley was doing some weird experiment (maybe with Readcube??) and forgot about it!

Fast forward to about a month ago, and I was preparing for a Phd briefing session and I for some reason I started looking again at the Google Scholar interface.

There was the usual -" Library Links section" well known to academic librarians, where you can put in your institution to benefit from your institution's link resolver but then I clicked on the "Account" section and noticed this new part that has a checkbox next to "Signed-in off-campus access links"

Curious I clicked on "Learn more" and came to the following page.

Reading it, my brain instantly clicked and all came clear. This "off-campus access link" was enabled by  CASA or Campus Activated Subscriber Access.

I even blogged about it in a 2017 post "Understanding Federated identity, RA21 and other authentication methods" but at the time everyone including me was so caught up in the then new RA21 (2+ years this is being further developed by SeamlessAccess.org, and we also see GetFTR - an application based on it, being rolled out  by some major publishers and platforms), that I forgot about CASA.

As noted the blog back then, the diagram below gives you a clear view of how CASA works.

Essentially, publishers such as Heinonline work with Google Scholar to recognise institutional users even if they are off campus using so called "off-campus access links" on publisher platforms.

As noted in Google Scholar's help page, if you access such publisher content via Google Scholar results in-campus, they will know your institution and holdings and "indicate your subscription access to participating publishers so that they can allow you to read the full-text of these articles without logging in or using a proxy". This recording is done of course via a cookie. They helpfully note this lasts for 30 days.

And how does the off-campus links look like? You guessed it, exactly like what I saw in 2018 - dark grey box at the right side of the page.

I must admit I felt really foolish when I finally realised what that was.

When did this feature come into play?

It's unclear to me when did feature came into play, though searching my email, I see announcement of this from Heinonline in Oct 2017 , though it was somewhat vague. 

On the other hand, the wayback machine tells us the help page on "off-campus access links" appeared around 09 Oct 2018. 

So at best this feature has been around since Oct 2018 (roughly 16 months at time of writing) before I noticed this feature and at worse it has been around since Oct 2017 (over 2 years!)  a quick google search shows a lot of platforms and publishers support this including JSTOR, Gale, APA, Springer, APS, Ingenta Connect , Highwire , Project MUSE among others.

This is somewhat embarassing for me to miss such a big feature, as I watch the discovery space closely, in particularly Google Scholar.

That said, I feel less bad , when I search Twitter for mentions of this feature (Google Scholar off-campus access links)  and I could find nothing!

Searching through Libguides, I found only *one* University library mention of this feature and *one* mention of  Campus Activated Subscriber Access (but no mention of the Google Scholar interface option) almost every other guide talked about the well known library links feature.

On the vendor side there were a slew of announcements announcing support (which I remember at the time) but none mentioning how to activate it from the user side, or how it would look like from the user point of view. Roger Schonfeld asks the question.

Is there a good informational site from Google Scholar about its Campus Activated Subscriber Access? I am only finding announcements from content providers/platforms announcing adoption, which is not what I'm looking for.

— Roger C. Schonfeld (@rschon) April 30, 2018

Of course, I have no doubt, there are some librarians - perhaps the more technical ones doing electronic resources authentication who knew about this (I also now see a Primo suggestion around this), but I would wager this is new to most liaison librarians.

The other defense I have for not noticing this is it does not work for us, because like most institutions in Singapore, we channel all our traffic via Ezproxy, so we have no concept of in-campus and off-campus access and clicking on the grey PDF boxes does not help us access the PDF.

But this is besides the point, since it works for many if not most institutions, and all this makes me wonder, how many of our users have benefited from this without us librarians even knowing? Or are they even clicking on it? Presumably this is an opt-out function? What privacy issues are there, while we are worrying about GetFTR?

What about you? Did you know off CASA or Off-campus access links in Google Scholar before reading this?

BONUS - Google book shows library holdings

Filing this under - "Is this new or ?" section, someone on Twitter - tweeted that Google (not Google books) was now showing library holdings (at least for some public libraries).

Omg! Direct links to library holdings from a Google search result! When did this finally become a reality?! #dreamsdocometrue #critcat pic.twitter.com/3oNOtoMGuU

— Amber Billey (@justbilley) March 8, 2020

Quick test with the search 1984 did not yield anything. But doing the same with a US proxy - I hit jackpot.

Clicking on "Edit Location", I tried seeing what was possible, but looking at the suggestions, they all appear to be US States only. Hopefully they can expand it further?

More testing also needs to be done to see if it is Public Libraries only or if Academic libraries will be included. And lastly where are they getting the data from? OCLC?

edit : As noted by a commenter below, the data seems to be coming from Overdrive.