An interoperable and well-functioning network of repositories is an essential component of US national research infrastructure and will play a crucial role in creating a more open and equitable global scholarly communications system. With the advent of the recent OSTP Memorandum requiring Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, there is a need to help repositories identify tools and practices to ensure that they can become an effective compliance option for this policy
Author: David Pride
UKCoRR Members’ Day – CORE Panel Session
The UKCoRR Members’ Day took place on November 13th and, at very short notice, was held online due to the ongoing technical problems currently being experienced by The British Library, who were the original hosts for the day long event.
Our panel session, entitled “CORE, repositories and supporting UKRI OA Policy” saw substantial participation with more than 120 people from U.K. HEIs in attendance. The session opened with a presentation from Professor Petr Knoth, Head of CORE. This presentation detailed CORE’s recent advancements and developments planned for the coming months, with the focus on how the tools and services being built by CORE can best serve the repository communities’ needs, with particular regard to the UKRI’s Open Access policy.
SoFAIR: The Open University to coordinate new international project to facilitate the reproducibility of research studies
We are pleased to announce that the Open University has just been awarded a new research grant in the international CHISTERA Open Research Data & Software Call which aims to enhance the discoverability and reusability of open research software.
Open research software and data are pivotal for scientific innovation and transparency, but are often not cited as first-class bibliographic records. Much of these software mentions therefore remain concealed within the text of research papers, hampering their discoverability, attribution, and reuse. This, in turn, makes it harder to reproduce research studies. The SoFAIR project (from Making Software FAIR) aims to address this critical issue by enhancing the management of the research software lifecycle and ensuring research software and data adheres to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. The project will build on the existing capabilities of the open scholarly infrastructures operated by the project partners. SoFAIR is a €499k international project coordinated by (1) The Open University in partnership with (2) INRIA, France; (3) Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic; (4) the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), Poland; and (5) The European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), United Kingdom. SoFAIR is funded under the 2022 CHIST-ERA Open and Reusable Research Data and Software (ORD) call.
CORE Team wins Best Paper award at TPDL2023
The CORE team were at The University of Zadar in Croatia last week for the 27th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) where they were presented with the Best Paper award for their submission entitled ‘CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering’
David and Petr accepting the award at the conference dinner
The paper’s authors; David Pride, Matteo Cancellieri and Petr Knoth are incredibly proud to have their work recognised in this way at this prestigious international conference.
Detecting duplicate records and manuscript versions in your repository
There are many reasons why a repository may end up with multiple copies of an article, for example, having the author’s original manuscript and the final post-review copy is a common scenario of near-duplicate content. Another example might be when multiple co-authors deposit the same manuscript without being aware of each other. Detecting (near-)duplicates and distinguishing them from different versions of the same article is both challenging and time-consuming. We have seen that a typical repository will have hundreds of duplicates and near-duplicate records, signifying the scale of this issue.
CORE + GROBID: Structured Text from 34 Million Scientific Documents (and counting)
We very recently surveyed our CORE members to ask what was most important to them and we received wide-ranging feedback. The CORE dashboard provides a range of tools for our data providers and their repository managers and users. Much of the feedback we received was regarding providing additional or enhanced tools for managing repository content via the dashboard. For example, metadata validation and enrichment tools were regarded as highly important.
Interestingly however, what was most important was making repository content machine-readable. This is closely linked to identifying funding information and rights-retention strategies. Ensuring content is machine-readable allows for the extraction of far richer information from full-text documents than that available in the metadata alone. In the U.S., the recent OSPT memo on ‘Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research‘ includes machine-readability as a required component of the archiving and deposition of federally funded research.
Asking CORE members what matters to them…
We recently held the inaugural meeting of the CORE Board of Supporters where we were joined by 32 representatives from the organisations that have committed to supporting the ongoing sustainability of CORE by joining our membership program.
These amazing institutions are critical to the survival of CORE and we’re incredibly grateful for the support they provide us.
Current CORE members
We work with our members as part of our commitment to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), by listening to our members we can understand precisely what is most important to them. Prior to this kickoff meeting, we therefore sent a wide-ranging survey to gauge what really matters to our members’ repositories, their users and the staff that manage them.
CORE published in Nature Scientific Data
We’re proud and excited to announce that the paper authored by our team entitled ‘CORE: a Global aggregation Service for Open access Papers’, was accepted for publication and is now available as an open access article via Nature.com.
This paper is the culmination of work by the whole CORE team, with contributions from team members both past and present. It discusses how CORE has grown from a research project initiated by Dr. Petr Knoth in 2010 to the service it is today, serving over 30 million unique users each month. The paper also elaborates on the continuously growing CORE dataset and details the systematic challenges associated with gathering research papers from thousands of data providers worldwide at an unprecedented scale and the novel solutions developed to address these challenges.
Update on Delivering the CORE Membership Programme
We’re keen to update you with the latest developments as we continue to welcome more CORE Members and keep improving the tools and support for members while delivering on our mission to index all open access research worldwide. In March, we welcomed another six new institutions who have joined CORE as Supporting and Sustaining members; University of Exeter, Cardiff University, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Hull, University of Nottingham and University of Strathclyde. A huge thank you goes out to all of these amazing folks!
CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and AI for credible, trustworthy question answering
Update 6th July 2023 – Our paper entitled “CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering.” has been accepted to TPDL2023 and will be published in the LCNS series by Springer.
The public release of ChatGPT-3 in November last year captured the public’s imagination and turned this technology into front page news overnight. Only this week we saw the release of its much more powerful sibling, ChatGPT-4. In just a few short weeks there have already been some frankly startling demonstrations of the capabilities of these models, from writing poetry to code completion amongst many others.