Clarivate, a leading global provider of transformative intelligence, has announced Nexus Connect, an AI gateway to universities’ academic resources and services. Nexus Connect is designed to meet users wherever they work – as a connector inside leading general-purpose AI chat agents, such as ChatGPT or Claude.
AI chat agents increasingly serve as the main workspace for students and researchers. In recent months, Model Context Protocol (MCP) – an open standard that lets AI chat agents connect directly to external data sources, tools and services – has emerged as a powerful way to bring academic resources directly into these environments and ground AI responses in trusted content. But as vendors across the academic ecosystem release product-specific MCP services, libraries are left out of the picture – with no visibility, control or certainty that their licensed resources and services are surfaced.
Nexus Connect addresses this directly, integrating with other platforms that support MCP integration. Powered by the Clarivate Academic AI Platform, it gives users easy access to their university-licensed content and services, directly from AI chat agents. It brings together Clarivate content and services, library resources and services from other academic vendors into a single institutional presence.
Nexus Connect joins Clarivate Nexus Extend, a browser-based academic assistant, as part of Clarivate’s growing suite of solutions designed to meet AI users where they are.
Oren Beit-Arie, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Innovation, Academia and Government at Clarivate, said: “Libraries are where trusted knowledge lives and our goal is to make sure that remains true in AI environments.
“Nexus Connect is the latest example of our strategic approach to academic AI – embedding transformative intelligence into our products, containing our carefully curated data and content, while connecting AI users to trusted resources. We are providing institutions with a unified layer that keeps their resources and identity in front of students and researchers. Alongside Nexus Extend, it keeps libraries at the centre of research and learning.”
Shirley Wong, University Librarian, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said: “User expectations are changing fast as they want the speed and ease of AI as part of how they study and research. Our priority is to bring AI to users in a way they can trust, grounded in the library’s resources and expertise. MCP lets us do that, by building trusted AI services within our institutional environment.”
Five universities in North America and APAC will be among the first institutions to deploy Nexus Connect. A broad early access programme is planned for July 2026.
Core capabilities include:
• Entitlement-based access: Users can discover the resources their library has licensed
• Institutional identity: The library stays visible and central, under the university’s brand
• Configurable scope: Libraries control which services are exposed and how content sources are prioritised
• Extensible architecture: Institutions can start with one service and expand over time
• Enterprise-grade security and privacy: Built to meet security and privacy standards
Nexus Connect launches with two use cases available to early adopter partners:
• Academic discovery: powered by Primo and the Clarivate Central Discovery Index (CDI), students and researchers can search and retrieve library materials – including local resources – directly from their AI chat environment, with links into the library’s holdings for full access.
• End-user library services: powered by Alma and Primo, users can manage book loans, holds, renewals and library accounts directly from their AI chat agent.
Libraries and universities who wish to shape the Nexus Connect roadmap can apply for the early access programme.
