EndNote Click (Formerly Kopernio): What It Retrieves, and Who Configures Your Institution’s Access

EndNote Click is a free browser extension published by Clarivate that tries to put the full-text PDF of an article one click away from wherever you are reading about it. It was called Kopernio until Clarivate rebranded it, and that rename is still the single biggest source of confusion around it: older library guides, LibGuides pages and comparison articles say “Kopernio”, the login screen and the extension say “EndNote Click”, and the old domain still works, so nothing ever breaks loudly enough to get fixed.

The other confusion is more consequential. EndNote Click shares a brand with EndNote Desktop and its Cite While You Write plugin, but it is a different product doing a different job. And it is configured in a way that is genuinely unlike LibKey Nomad, BrowZine and Lean Library: with those, the library configures its own holdings, proxy and dashboard settings. With EndNote Click, the access configuration for your institution is held by Clarivate, the researcher selects the institution from Clarivate’s index, and the library’s only documented route to create or correct that record is a lookup form and an email address.

Everything below that is attributed to the vendor is a vendor claim, checked against Clarivate’s own live pages on 26 August 2026. Where something could not be confirmed, it says so.

What EndNote Click is, and three things it is not

It is a browser extension. Its own site links installs for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, and it describes itself as free to the researcher: “Save time accessing full-text PDFs with the free EndNote Click browser plugin.” It works, per the vendor, on more than 20,000 academic platforms, both on and off campus.

It is not a reference manager

EndNote Click retrieves PDFs. It does not hold your library, format your citations or write your bibliography. Its own homepage carries a row of integration logos captioned “EndNote Click integrates seamlessly with” EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, Dropbox, PubMed and Web of Science. A tool whose vendor advertises that it works with Zotero and Mendeley is not competing with them, and the homepage says as much directly: “Once you have the PDF, what you do with it is up to you.”

If you are choosing a reference manager, that is a separate decision — see Zotero vs EndNote or RefWorks. Installing EndNote Click does not commit you to any of them.

It is not part of EndNote Desktop

This is the error to avoid. EndNote Desktop is installed software with a Word integration; getting that integration working is its own troubleshooting exercise, covered in our Cite While You Write install guide. EndNote Click is a browser extension installed from a browser add-on store, with its own account and its own sign-in. Installing one does not install the other, a licence for one is not a licence for the other, and a Cite While You Write fault is never an EndNote Click fault. The shared brand is a marketing decision, not a technical relationship — the EndNote Click homepage cross-sells EndNote 2025 as a separate purchase.

It is not a replacement for your link resolver

It sits in front of one. Per the vendor’s libraries page, when EndNote Click cannot deliver a PDF by subscription or open access, it now hands the user back to the institutional link resolver via OpenURL, “providing access to aggregator content, non-digital holdings and other resources you specify, such as document delivery or interlibrary loans.” The resolver, and the KBART knowledge base behind it, still do the work they always did.

The Kopernio rename: what is verified, and what is not

The acquisition is primary-source verified

Clarivate Analytics announced the acquisition on 10 April 2018, from Philadelphia. Kopernio was a London-based startup established in 2017 by Jan Reichelt, co-founder of Mendeley, and Ben Kaube, co-founder of Newsflo. Reichelt joined as Managing Director, Web of Science; Kaube joined as Managing Director, Kopernio. The press release is still live at clarivate.com, and it has been retroactively annotated: it now reads “AI-technology startup Kopernio (now EndNote Click)”.

The rename date is not

The rebrand to EndNote Click is widely reported as having happened in 2020, but we could not find a live Clarivate announcement of it — the obvious candidate URLs on clarivate.com return 404. Treat 2020 as reported rather than verified. What is verifiable is the present state: the product is called EndNote Click, and it lives at click.endnote.com.

What still says Kopernio, checked 26 August 2026

Where	What it still says
kopernio.com	Serves the live EndNote Click site at HTTP 200. It does not redirect to click.endnote.com.
The Firefox install link on click.endnote.com	Points at addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/kopernio/
The JavaScript config on every public page	Declares the API base as a constant named KOPERNIO_API
The institution lookup form on the libraries page	Its submit button carries the CSS class kopernio-btn-primary
Clarivate’s own 2018 press release	Still links kopernio.com/library-guides, which now returns 404
The click.endnote.com homepage	Carries an image captioned “EndNote Click is part of the Web of Science Group”

Why this matters operationally, and not just as trivia: because kopernio.com still returns HTTP 200, a library guide that links to it is not a broken link. No link checker will ever flag it. Staff will not get a report. The page will keep telling researchers to install something called Kopernio, and the researcher will land on a site branded EndNote Click and reasonably assume they are in the wrong place. If you maintain library guides, searching your own estate for the string “Kopernio” is a five-minute job that a link audit will never do for you.

What actually happens when a researcher clicks the button

Per Clarivate’s libraries page, the resolution order is:

1. The Version of Record, from the publisher, on your subscription. The vendor’s wording is that EndNote Click “always prioritizes the Version of Record directly from the publisher.”
2. An open-access alternative, if the subscription does not cover it — searched from “repositories, discovery services and other legitimate sources of access.” This is the same territory Unpaywall covers, and the same reason bronze open access makes availability harder to predict than a holdings list suggests.
3. Your link resolver, via OpenURL, if neither of the above lands — the document-delivery and interlibrary-loan fallback described above.

Authentication is not something EndNote Click provides. On campus the user is normally IP-authenticated and no routing is needed. Off campus, the vendor states the extension uses “your library’s authentication infrastructure” and “respects your current configuration” — that is your EZproxy, OpenAthens or Shibboleth stack, or SeamlessAccess, exactly as it is for every other access-broker extension.

The vendor also states that usage is “automatically COUNTER compliant”, which is worth a sentence for anyone reconciling statistics: the point of that claim is that access routed through the extension should surface in your publisher COUNTER reports rather than disappearing from them. We have not seen an independent audit of that, and we have not tested it; if usage attribution matters to your renewals, verify it against your own reports rather than taking the claim on trust. The same applies to the vendor’s scale figures — more than 750,000 researchers, more than 2,000 institutions, more than 20,000 platforms. They are vendor-published and not independently audited.

How institutional access is configured, and who holds the configuration

This is where EndNote Click differs most from the other access-broker extensions, and it is the part almost nothing written about the product states plainly.

On the vendor’s libraries page, the entire librarian-facing configuration route is a search box. It asks: “Is EndNote Click configured to provide subscription access to your institution?” You type your institution’s name and press “Check your institution”. Below it: “Can’t find your university? Please try alternative or English spellings of your institution. Still can’t find your university? Let us know” — where “Let us know” is an email address.

The same page tells librarians to “follow the EndNote Click library setup”. That phrase links to an in-page anchor pointing back at the same search box, not to a separate setup document.

The institution index behind that box is public, and it is thin. Querying it the way the page’s own search box does returns, for a given institution, only its display name, its domain, its aliases and an internal numeric ID. Whatever proxy prefix, EZproxy stanza, federation entry or entitlement mapping sits behind that ID is held server-side by Clarivate and is not published anywhere we could find.

The practical consequences are worth being blunt about:

• You cannot inspect your own configuration. There is no equivalent of opening your EZproxy config file or exporting your KBART holdings and reading what is actually in it.
• You cannot correct it directly. When a library’s KBART data is wrong, the library fixes the KBART data. When an EndNote Click institution record is wrong, the fix is a support request to Clarivate.
• You cannot easily prove it is right. The only self-service test available to a librarian is the one the vendor offers: install the extension, sign in as your institution, and try to open articles off campus on a personal device.

This is a real design difference, not a criticism of the product’s access quality. It reverses the ownership of the configuration compared with the library-configured model. Our comparison of LibKey Nomad, BrowZine and Lean Library found that most researcher-reported failures with those tools are configuration problems rather than extension problems — stale knowledge-base coverage dates, holdings-profile gaps, proxy stanza faults. That framing is useful precisely because the library can go and fix those things. With EndNote Click, the equivalent diagnosis leads to a ticket rather than a config change.

What we could not confirm about the setup route

We could not find a self-service librarian dashboard for EndNote Click configuration. The librarian resource that Clarivate’s own live press release still points at, kopernio.com/library-guides, returns 404 in both its kopernio.com and click.endnote.com forms. The general support destination the site offers is support.clarivate.com/Endnote/. Note also that Clarivate’s current EndNote documentation has moved to a versioned URL shape — paths under a 2025 version segment, split by Windows and macOS — and older documentation URLs 404, so a bookmarked link from a library guide is likely dead even when the content still exists. If a librarian configuration console exists, it is behind a support or account-management channel we could not reach from public documentation, and you should ask your Clarivate representative rather than assume either way.

Where it sits next to the other tools that solve overlapping problems

EndNote Click, LibKey Nomad, Lean Library and Unpaywall all answer the same researcher question — “can I read this paper right now?” — by different routes. They are not mutually exclusive and many researchers run more than one.

Tool	The job it does	Who configures it
EndNote Click	Retrieve the PDF: subscription Version of Record first, open access second, your link resolver third.	Clarivate holds the institution record; the library requests it and requests corrections.
LibKey Nomad, BrowZine, Lean Library	Access plus, variously, current awareness and library-service visibility. Covered in depth in our three-way comparison.	The library, through its own knowledge base, proxy settings and vendor dashboard.
Unpaywall	Open-access copies only. No subscription access, no institutional dependency.	Nobody. It requires no institutional configuration at all.
GetFTR	Real-time entitlement checking, signalled at the publisher end rather than by a researcher-installed layer.	Publishers and discovery services, working with the institution.
EZproxy, OpenAthens, Shibboleth and SeamlessAccess	The authentication layer everything above rides on. Not an alternative to any of them.	The library and its identity provider.

A useful sequencing rule for anyone evaluating a paid or library-provisioned access layer: install Unpaywall first and live with it for a fortnight. It is free, needs no institutional setup, and closes the open-access half of the gap. Whatever access problem remains after that is the problem you are actually buying a solution to.

Nothing here should be read as a ranking. The three-way comparison linked above establishes the LibKey and Lean Library landscape carefully, including current ownership, and this page does not repeat it.

No pricing, and why we are not quoting any

Clarivate publishes no price for EndNote Click, and we state none. The researcher-facing extension is described on its own site as free to install and use. Whether an institutional agreement, a Web of Science entitlement, or nothing at all sits behind the institution record is not stated in the public documentation we could reach. Any institutional terms with Clarivate are negotiated and vary by institution type, size, existing subscriptions and consortium membership, so a figure quoted in a review article is somebody else’s price. Before requesting a quote for anything in this space, check whether a national or regional consortial agreement already covers you.

Off campus: why it works on campus and fails at home

The pattern is the same for every access-broker extension, and diagnosing it is the same exercise. On campus you are usually IP-authenticated, so the extension never has to route you anywhere and everything looks perfect. Off campus it hands you to your proxy or federation, and any gap there surfaces to the user as “the extension is broken”.

What to check, in order:

1. Reproduce it off campus, on a personal device, not on VPN. A VPN that puts you back inside the campus IP range hides exactly the failure you are trying to find.
2. Confirm the institution selected inside the extension is the right one. Multi-campus systems, hospital and medical-school affiliations, and institutions with several English spellings are the common traps here, and the vendor’s own page warns about spelling variants.
3. Test the same article through your link resolver directly. If the resolver also fails, the fault is upstream in your knowledge base or proxy, and no extension will fix it.
4. Test a title you know is subscribed and one you know is not. This separates “the configuration is wrong” from “we genuinely do not hold this”.
5. Only then raise it with Clarivate, with the article DOI, the publisher platform, the institution as selected in the extension, and whether the resolver test passed.

Checklist for librarians

• Search your LibGuides, intranet and training materials for the string “Kopernio”. Link checkers will not find these, because kopernio.com still returns 200.
• Also search for bookmarked Clarivate documentation URLs; the EndNote documentation has moved to a versioned, platform-split path structure and older URLs 404.
• Check your institution in the lookup on the vendor’s libraries page, using alternative and English spellings before concluding it is absent.
• If it is absent or wrong, use the contact route on that page. There is no self-service correction path we could find.
• Test off campus, on a personal device, as an ordinary user account.
• Decide explicitly whether EndNote Click runs alongside or instead of any library-configured extension you already license, and say which in your guidance. Researchers running two access extensions that both inject buttons into PubMed will ask you which one to trust.
• Keep the guidance separate from your EndNote Desktop guidance. Filing them together is what produces the “I have EndNote, why do I need EndNote Click?” question.

Checklist for researchers

• Install it from your browser’s add-on store, then sign in and set your institution. Without the institution set, you get the open-access half only.
• Test it off campus before you rely on it for a deadline.
• Do not expect it to manage your references. Point it at whichever manager you already use.
• If a PDF does not appear, check whether your library holds the title at all before reporting a fault.
• Treat it as one of several routes. Unpaywall, your library’s own extension and your resolver will each sometimes succeed where the others do not, and none of them makes the illegitimate routes a reasonable option.

Frequently asked questions

Is Kopernio the same thing as EndNote Click?

Yes. Clarivate Analytics acquired Kopernio on 10 April 2018 and later rebranded it EndNote Click. Clarivate’s own press release now reads “Kopernio (now EndNote Click)”. The old domain kopernio.com still serves the live product at HTTP 200 rather than redirecting, which is why so many library pages still use the old name without anything appearing broken.

When exactly was Kopernio renamed?

The rebrand is widely reported as 2020, but we could not verify it against a live Clarivate announcement — the candidate URLs return 404. We report the acquisition date as verified and the rename year as reported only.

Do I need EndNote to use EndNote Click?

No. It is a separate browser extension with its own account, and its own site advertises integration with Zotero, Mendeley and Dropbox as well as EndNote. It is not installed by EndNote Desktop and it is not the Cite While You Write plugin.

Is EndNote Click a reference manager?

No. It retrieves full-text PDFs. It does not store your library, apply citation styles or build a bibliography. Pair it with whichever reference manager you already use.

Does it replace our link resolver or our proxy?

Neither. It uses your existing authentication infrastructure, and it hands users back to your OpenURL resolver when it cannot deliver a PDF itself. Your knowledge base and proxy configuration remain the substrate, and its errors remain your errors.

How does our library configure EndNote Click for our users?

Through Clarivate rather than through your own systems. The published route is the institution lookup on the vendor’s libraries page, plus a contact address if your institution is missing. The public institution record exposes only name, domain and aliases; the access configuration behind it is held by Clarivate. We could not find a self-service librarian dashboard, and the librarian resource Clarivate’s press release still links has 404’d.

What does it cost?

Clarivate publishes no price, and we quote none. The extension is described as free to the researcher. Institutional terms, where any apply, are negotiated.

Should we run EndNote Click or LibKey Nomad or Lean Library?

They are not strictly alternatives, and libraries commonly run more than one. The clearest way to think about the difference is who holds the configuration: with LibKey Nomad and Lean Library the library configures its own holdings, proxy and dashboard settings, so most failures are things the library can go and fix; with EndNote Click the institution record is Clarivate’s, so the equivalent fix is a support request. For the differences among the other three, see our comparison of LibKey Nomad, BrowZine and Lean Library.

Can a researcher get most of this for free with no library involvement?

For the open-access portion, largely yes — Unpaywall requires no institutional configuration at all. The subscription half is what an institution-aware layer adds, and that is the part worth measuring before you invest effort in it.

For more on the tooling researchers use to find, retrieve and manage literature, see the research tools hub.