Google Scholar’s feature CASA for off-campus users

The scientific community has come together to find new ways and solutions to the problems being imposed by the pandemic in sharing and accessing knowledge across the globe. The communities have collaborated and worked across the borders to adopt new strategies to disseminate and provide access to information.

CASA is one of the examples, Google and HighWire co-developed CASA (Campus Activated Subscriber Access) to provide access to subscribed content from home when the user's device is not connected to the institution's network.

CASA makes note of a user’s institutional affiliation when they access content from an authorized on-campus location, and then enables continued access to their library’s journal and book holdings from home or when using a device not connected to the institution’s network. - Google Scholar¹

Google Scholar's CASA is free. Users can access all the journals hosted by HighWire and indexed in Google Scholar. It is an automatically enabled authentication enhancement. Google automatically creates an affiliation between the user and their institution when the user visits Google Scholar on campus and connects to the institution’s network. Once the Google scholar records that the user has access privilege to the institution’s subscribed content then it grants them immediate access to the articles and journals when the user is off-campus. The affiliation lasts for one month,br.. Users need to renew it again by visiting and connecting to the campus network and accessing the Google scholar through an institution IP, at least once in a month.

The user needs not to login in Google account. Affiliation is created simply by going on to Google scholar while on their Institution’s network. However, one advantage of logging in Google account while on an institution's network and accessing Google scholar is that their CASA token will persist amongst all of their devices (desktop, laptop, mobile, etc) where they are logged in to that account.

All the libraries that participate in Google scholar will automatically have this feature (CASA) enabled. Instructions for activation can be found here for connecting Google scholar to the libraries' resources and for participating in Google scholar.

References:

1. https://www.igi-global.com/librarians/casa/
2. https://www.highwirepress.com/resources/data-sheets/casa-faq/