The annual OU Research Excellence Awards highlight the diverse research undertaken at the OU and recognise the impact that this research has for the economy, the environment, and society as a whole. More than 250 Open University (OU) staff, students, funders and partners came together in London on the 22nd September for this year’s awards.
We are extremely pleased that the CORE team was announced as runner-up in the highly-contested ‘Best External Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange Award’ for its knowledge exchange activities with a diverse range of external partners spanning from innovators, AI technology companies, digital library providers, plagiarism detection providers, academic social networks, funders and others, including its over decade long partnership with Jisc, the digital solutions provider for UK education and research. CORE received a small financial award to support research activities from the OU in recognition of this achievement.
CORE provides a wide range of services to support U.K. Higher Education Institutions via their Jisc membership, including the CORE Repository Dashboard which provides tools for repository management, content enrichment, metadata quality assessment and open access compliance checking with the UKRI OA policies. Additionally, CORE supports other Jisc projects such as OpenAthens and IRUS (Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) which enables institutions to demonstrate the value and impact of their institutional repositories.
Present at the ceremony was Dr. Petr Knoth, founder and head of the CORE project, who commented, “We are delighted that the work we undertake at CORE has again been recognised for the wide-ranging impact it delivers, in this case in the area of our knowledge exchange activities. Our close partnership with Jisc over the last ten years has allowed us to sustain and grow the services delivered by CORE and support all U.K. Higher Education Institutes with a range of critical services for their repository infrastructures.”
CORE has a strong history at these awards, including winning the overall Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity award in 2019 for its delivery of Open Access services to over 30 million monthly users from 165 countries across the globe. Further details of the full range of services available can be seen at https://core.ac.uk