Usage of unlicensed content
If your institution's usage reports show hits on titles not subscribed to, there are a few reasons for this.
Firstly, our usage statistics reports reflect all hits on all Springer Nature platforms (e.g., nature.com, Springer Nature Link, etc.) coming from patrons authenticated as belonging to your institutions (e.g., via SSO, IP ranges, etc.). For the content your institution has licensed, access is always via one of these authentication methods. However, for other titles which you do not subscribe to, access could come from users at your institution with personal subscriptions, individual article purchases, or if the content is free to read or Open Access.
Another reason for usage of unlicensed content could be multiple recognition of users, where a user logs in with their username and password but is from a different institution that also has access rights. In these cases, the usage generated will count for both accounts.
In most cases, the numbers for these extra hits are quite small. If they are large, it may be due to a particular article or journal that has attracted a lot of attention, or it may indicate that there are multiple personal subscriptions at your institution.
If you require further assistance, you can submit a query to our Institutional Support team via Report online access issue. If you would rather email or phone them, their contact information is available on our Contact Customer Support page.
Robotic usage
Activity generated by known internet robots and crawlers is excluded from all COUNTER usage reports. A list of internet robots is provided by COUNTER and mandatory to be applied by compliant vendors.