This International Open Access Week, the global research community is asking a vital question: Who owns our knowledge?
At CORE (COnnecting REpositories), our answer is clear and unapologetic:
We all do.
For over a decade, CORE has stood at the forefront of the open access movement, not as a passive service, but as an active builder of open scholarly infrastructure that enables research ideas to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) in a free, visible, and inclusive manner. We don’t just support open access. We are open access.
Since the early days of the Open Access movement (as coined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative declaration), and especially in the age of AI, we have come to understand that the full potential of scientific discovery can only be realised when research is openly available not just to humans, but also to software and intelligent systems designed to build upon it. This is where CORE plays a transformative role. By indexing and enabling lawful reuse of research outputs at an unprecedented scale.
“Contrary to what many believe, the knowledge contained in scholarly papers, regardless of whether the papers themselves are open or closed, is not owned by publishers or locked behind legal walls. Scientific knowledge, as such, cannot be copyrighted. It is universally recognised as part of the commons, a collective human achievement that belongs to everyone.” – says Prof. Petr Knoth, Head of CORE. What copyright frameworks protect is not the knowledge itself, but expressions of that knowledge in the form of a specific research paper. This means that everyone is able to use the knowledge contained in research papers. This distinction is more important now than ever.
In a scholarly world where visibility often still depends on commercial gatekeeping, CORE flips the script. We index over 400 million scholarly resources, host more than 40 million full texts, link to over 100 million full texts, and provide access to over 100 million abstracts from more than 14,000 direct data providers, including repositories that are often overlooked, those without DOIs, and those outside traditional publishing pipelines. In indexing this content, we don’t just take, but we give back to the community, by providing daily support to repositories in identifying technical issues, communicating them, and curating comprehensiveness for the benefit of all who rely on the network of open repositories we love!
CORE doesn’t just index what’s easy or commercially viable to index; we include content from every region of the world, including the Global South. This is more than a data principle; it’s a lived practice, reflected in the diversity of the CORE team itself which includes people from the Global South, reflecting the needs of the global research community we serve.
This is not a minor detail, it’s central to how knowledge becomes visible or invisible. By making these outputs discoverable, CORE ensures that scholarship from all regions not just the well-resourced shapes the global research conversation.
This isn’t just technical work. It’s a statement: Every piece of research matters. Every voice deserves to be heard.
CORE’s infrastructure ensures that doctoral theses, working papers, grey literature, and local conference outputs are not lost in the margins. We make them discoverable, machine-readable, and part of the global scholarly conversation.
Infrastructure That Belongs to the Community
CORE is governed by its community through our community governance approach which involves several bodies representing the community voices, including the Board of Supporters; which consists of academic institutions who are our Members; Advisory Board: which is composed of internationally recognised open science leaders; and the Research Network: which represents the voices of researchers. We don’t just serve repositories; we co-develop with them.
We Are Open Access And We’re Just Getting Started
This year’s theme of Open Access week asks us to reflect on how knowledge is created, shared, and owned. At CORE, we believe that knowledge is owned by the community that needs it the most.
As this year’s Open Access Week coincides with our celebration of 15 years of CORE building open scholarly infrastructure, we’re reaffirming our commitment:
We are open access. We are community-led. We are reclaiming knowledge.