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 Nature.com coming from your institution’s IP ranges, regardless of the method of access. For site licenses, access is always via automatic IP recognition, but for other titles which you do not subscribe to, access could come from users at your institution with personal subscriptions, individual article purchases, or from a promotional free article or issue online.
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 Online Service team via our webform. If you would rather email or phone them, their contact information is available on our Contact Customer Support page.
Additionally, the COUNTER report usage statistics will show usage of all content that is freely available, including Open Access Journals and eBooks, open choice articles in hybrid journals, and usage from other content that is freely available. Another reason for usage of unlicensed content could be that some content has temporarily been made freely available due to a marketing campaign, etc.
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.