Students, researchers and staff already ask AI tools about the literature. But those tools cannot see the journals and services their institution licenses, so people work from abstracts, snippets and guesses. A connector is how an AI tool reaches an outside service. An institution-branded connector is one connector, carrying the institution’s name, that brings its authorized sources into the AI tools its members already use.
What the institution decides
- Which sources appear: publisher services, open scholarly infrastructure and the licensed services the institution subscribes to.
- How each source is reached: the credentials for each service are held centrally and securely, not handed to every member.
- Who counts as a member: people sign in with the identity they already use at the institution.
What a member experiences
- They find their institution’s connector in their AI tool and sign in once.
- They ask questions as usual. When the AI needs an article, its access is checked against what the institution is entitled to.
- The article arrives with its citation, where the copy came from, and any retraction notice the source records.
- Anything they are not entitled to read comes back as a link to the publisher’s page, never as the full text.
Why one connector beats many
Without a shared connector, each person configures each source in each AI tool, if they can at all. Licences go unused, support requests multiply, and nobody can see how AI is used. With one connector, the library chooses the sources once, keeps credentials in one place, and sees usage in the reports it already collects.
Reporting usage
Libraries already measure usage with COUNTER reports. AI use can be reported the same way, as usage with the access method “Agent”, so the library can see which articles AI tools checked, requested and received on its members’ behalf.
Where Research Connect is today
The Research Connect Community Edition works today in ChatGPT, Claude, Mistral and any other AI tool that supports MCP (the Model Context Protocol, the open standard AI tools use to connect to outside services). Individual researchers choose their institution, so that each article is checked against its entitlements. It delivers citations, provenance and retraction notices, and COUNTER Release 5.1.1 reports of AI usage. Institutions can bring their own repositories into the same connector, alongside the sources they license.
