We are extremely happy to announce that we have managed to secure a substantial five-year funding commitment from Microsoft’s Open Data Initiative to improve CORE’s services.
Specifically, the funding will support CORE in:
Author: David Pride
CORE welcomes University of Glasgow as a sustaining member
In December 2022, we launched the CORE Membership program for data providers. CORE is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission and one of the signatories of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures POSI. We have since seen this membership grow to over 30 institutions who have committed to supporting CORE, and the membership program is now a key component of CORE’s long term sustainability plan.
Our wonderful CORE members!
Today we are extremely happy to announce the latest addition to our membership roll. The University of Glasgow has committed to support CORE as a sustaining member for the next five years. This is a fantastic public commitment and we are extremely grateful to the team at Glasgow for their support and acknowledgement for the work that CORE does.
The CORE Rights Retention Statement tracker
CORE recently introduced the Rights Retention Statements tracker to the CORE Dashboard, and it is now available to CORE members. An increasing number of UK institutions have implemented an institutional rights retention policy, specifying rights for publications for all articles (and sometimes books) with a specific publisher. There is a useful map of these institutions here. Once a policy is in place, the majority of articles will probably not have a rights statement within each article. However, even with an institutional agreement in place, there are cases when it is important to check the text.
CORE Board of Supporters Meeting
This week saw the latest CORE Board of Supporters Meeting take place online. We had 28 attendees from our member institutions and, for the first time, we were also joined by institutions that are working with CORE as a part of the URSN pilot project, funded by SPARC.
The Board of Supporters is an integral component of the CORE governance structure and exists as part of our role as signatories to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures (POSI).
Figure 1: The CORE governance structure
Professor Petr Knoth hosted the meeting and first introduced a round up of the work that CORE has been doing in the last six months, covering some of the new tools that CORE has released for members including the Rights Retention module, new indexing request capabilities, better email alert tracking and the ability to categorise a repository’s content into ‘sets’ allowing for better management of your content.
A review of CORE at Open Repositories 2024
The name CORE was originally derived from COnnecting REpositories and it is therefore fitting that one of the most important gatherings for our team is the annual Open Repositories Conference. Now in its 19th year, the conference took place last week in Gothenburg, Sweden. Over 400 people were in attendance and the conference attracted a diverse audience of academics, librarians, developers, repository managers and many others.
The team from CORE, represented by project lead Professor Petr Knoth and lead developer Matteo Cancellieri, presented a range of work that CORE has been undertaking in the last twelve months. This includes some of the latest technical work the CORE team has been doing to deliver a range of new tools and services including identifying and extracting authors’ Rights Retention Statements from full text academic articles and the automatic detection of duplicate records in institutional repositories. The CORE team will also present their recent award-winning work on CORE-GPT, an LLM based QA platform with the answers drawn from scientific documents hosted by CORE.
CORE launches reindexing button for data providers
We support a huge range of data providers, from the smallest institutional repositories to the largest Open Access and preprint repositories such as PubMed Central and Arxiv. Each of these repositories have differing needs but one requirement for almost all of them is increasing the visibility and discoverability of their content. Being indexed by CORE is a key component in meeting these requirements. A recent study demonstrated that being indexed by CORE increases downloads from a repository by an average of 16%, and up to 32% in some cases.
CORE participating in the UNESCO Open Science Monitoring Framework launch
In December, Professor Petr Knoth, founder and team lead for CORE was invited to participate in a workshop entitled ‘Building an Open Science Monitoring Framework with open technologies’ hosted by UNESCO at their Paris headquarters.
With many public and funder policies now mandating Open Access deposit of funded research, the need for tracking and measuring the impact of these policies becomes more pressing. This international workshop brought together more than 50 experts from research organisations, universities, nonprofits and national agencies to discuss how open technologies can best help in this effort and work towards monitoring the progress of open science itself.
SoFAIR is live! Kickoff, progress and website launch
This spring saw the launch of the multi-national SoFAIR project (Making Software FAIR: A machine-assisted workflow for the research software lifecycle), coordinated by The Open University and involving teams from six institutions across 5 countries. The project is funded by a €494k research grant in the international CHISTERA Open Research Data & Software Call which aims to enhance the discoverability and reusability of open research software.
The consortium partners
In January the SoFAIR project partners headed for the slightly chilly surroundings of Milton Keynes to gather for the SoFAIR project kick off meeting. The meeting took place over two days at the Walton Hall campus of The Open University and we were grateful to all of the project partners who travelled to the U.K. to join us. We were also fortunate enough to be able to arrange a visit to Bletchley Park as part of the proceedings.
AI for the Research Ecosystem workshop – #AI4RE
On March 22, 2024, the AI for the Research Ecosystem workshop (#AI4RE) took place in London, kindly hosted by UCL in the wonderful surroundings of Chandler House. The workshop was part of the Turing Institue’s AI UK Fringe series of events which took place around the U.K. The workshop focused on the intersection of the recent developments in Artificial Intelligence, such as Large Language Models and Deep Learning, and how these developments will impact current research practices.
The packed programme opened with a keynote by Prof. David De Roure of the University of Oxford, exploring knowledge infrastructures, social machines and how, and if, we can measure the rate of innovation – and whether it is increasing.
CORE Board of Supporters Meeting round up
This week saw the 2nd bi-annual CORE Board of Supporters Meeting take place online. The meeting was well attended and we are extremely pleased that 24 participants from 15 member institutions joined us. The Board of Supporters is an integral component of the CORE governance structure and exists as part of our role as signatories to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures (POSI).
Figure 1: The CORE governance structure
Covered in the meeting were many of the latest developments that CORE has been working on including the conversion of PDF documents to structured text to allow for machine-readability, detecting duplicates and different versions of scholarly documents within repositories., we’re extremely grateful to Kirsten Vallee from The University of Chicago who spoke about her repository’s experience using the CORE Dashboard deduplication module.