CORE update for October to December 2019

During the last quarter of 2019 CORE released new updates for two of its services, CORE Reader and CORE Discovery, and has initiated new collaborations, for example with LA Referencia. In addition, CORE was singled out for its contributions and was awarded for its outstanding impact of research on society and prosperity. Details about these and more news can be found below.

CORE won an Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award

During the Research Excellence Awards 2019 Ceremony dedicated to the 50th anniversary of The Open University, CORE was presented with the award for “Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award”. This important award reflects the clear value CORE represents to its millions of users as the largest repository of Open Access scientific knowledge.

“I am delighted to win this award and would like to thank everyone who contributed to the development of CORE since its start in 2010, including our key partner Jisc as well as other funders, our users and commercial customers and our fantastic and talented current and former staff. It has been a great pleasure for me to be able to lead this fantastic team that is so passionate about the mission of opening up research knowledge to all, including not just researchers, funders and librarians, but also the millions of our users from within the general public who are able to discover and access the results of research they have contributed to by paying their taxes. It has been a privilege for me to be able to run this project from within the Open University which fully embraces the mission of openness, lifelong education and knowledge sharing. I hope the work of my team, a service that has become an essential part of the open access infrastructure, will contribute to making the Open University a centre of excellence for Open Research in the future.” – Dr. Petr Knoth

CORE released the new updated version of CORE Reader

During the last quarter of the 2019 CORE was working on the redesigning and improvement of the new version of CORE Reader. Work on this development has commenced and now and now CORE Reader makes viewing full texts on research papers more sleek as it:

• harmonizes the UI of the CORE Reader with the rest of the CORE website,
• integrates CORE functionality including the CORE Recommender directly into the PDF viewer,
• makes it possible for CORE to start redirecting users directly from search engine results pages to the CORE Reader instead of just to the PDF.

This should result in more user engagement with CORE in the long term. Visit our full blog post about the CORE Reader to find more information about its functionalities.

CORE Discovery was updated with  a new functionality

CORE Discovery is free to use tool provided for researchers, students and the general public to find free to read research papers that might be behind a paywall on the publisher’s website. A significant feature that distinguishes CORE Discovery from other discovery services on the market is its unique  Recommender functionality. When an open access version is not available, CORE Discovery does not stop there but aims to always offer to the end user related open access articles. This is achieved through the integration of CORE Discovery with the CORE Recommender.

The new version of the extension is available for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera users. Read more about CORE Discovery and opportunities it opens to users.

CORE collaborations and negotiations

The last three months of 2019 have been very fruitful for CORE in terms of collaborations and support.

For instance, CORE Recommender has been integrated into LA Reference, which is the Latin American network of open access repositories. LA Referencia supports national Open Access strategies in Latin America through an interoperable platform, which shares and gives visibility to the scientific outputs generated in higher education and scientific research institutions. Read more about this integration. 

Also, CORE expressed its support to the objectives of PlanS to advance openness in all research subject fields:

• monitoring deposit of articles in repositories, as well as compliance to funder policies and measuring the time lag between deposit and publication/acceptance which is the unique capability of CORE;
• helping repositories to be interoperable with standards via CORE Repository Dashboard which allows institutions to ensure data in the repository is exposed correctly in line with applicable standards (OAI-PMH, Dublin Core, ResourceSync), troubleshoot data delivery issues and validate metadata against RIOXX ;
• enriching the aggregated data with Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) using a set of external databases, including Crossref, Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), PubMed rand ORCID. Another CORE’s ability is to link bibliographic data to full text deposits;
• linking of metadata and bibliographic records to open access full text in repositories and in CORE;
• providing open APIs to enriched content aggregated from repositories.

In the last quarter, CORE gave more attention on extending its ambassadors network. Through this network CORE aims to receive support to better serve communities represented in various countries around the world. With the ambassadors help CORE wants to optimise its services and increase the amount of free of cost open access research content that can be accessed by researchers, students, librarians and lifelong learners.

Finally, CORE concluded work regarding its integration with the PMC Linkout service. This means that full texts of papers that are available in the CORE collection but are not in PMC are now linked from the PMC website directly to CORE. This further extends the exposure of documents harvested by CORE and serves as an incentive for repositories to get aggregated and stay included in CORE.

CORE Statistics

With regards to the CORE statistics for the period of October – December 2019.

Content: CORE provides access to 24,936,921 free to read full text research papers with currently hosts 15,527,054 full texts hosted directly at CORE. It also provides 135,539,113 searchable research papers.

Data providers: CORE has added new data providers increasing the content providers to 9,787 in 145 countries.