Across the globe, higher education institutions are navigating intense financial pressures. Rising inflation, frozen tuition fees, and the increasing costs of digital services are stretching budgets thin. For repository managers and librarians, these pressures often translate into tough decisions about which services to keep and which to cut. In this context, open access infrastructure like CORE (COnnecting REpositories) can sometimes appear to be a “nice-to-have” rather than a necessity. But in reality, services like CORE are not luxuries; they are essential infrastructure that keeps research visible, discoverable, and compliant.
Author: Mo Ramushu
OCLC expands global partnerships with CORE sponsorship agreement
OCLC has announced a sponsorship agreement with CORE (COnnecting REpositories), expanding OCLC’s commitment to supporting open access research infrastructure worldwide. This partnership builds on OCLC’s recent agreements with organizations including the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA).
CORE is a not-for-profit service that provides access to millions of open access research papers in their comprehensive database. The service supports libraries, researchers, and institutions in discovering and accessing scholarly content.
Making Research Software FAIR: How SoFAIR Tackles the Reproducibility Challenge
Reproducibility is one of the significant challenges of contemporary science. A landmark survey revealed that more than 70% of researchers had failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than 50% were unable to reproduce their own (Baker, 2016).
“Single occurrences that cannot be reproduced are of no significance to science.” (Popper, 1935)
One of the less visible, but increasingly critical, factors contributing to this problem is the visibility and availability of research software. Software now underpins almost every stage of the research lifecycle from data collection and analysis to simulation, modelling, and visualisation. Yet despite its centrality, research software often remains hidden within manuscripts, mentioned fleetingly or omitted altogether. Without proper identification and registration, software is rarely linked back to the publications that introduced or used it, leaving its role in scientific discovery under-recognised and its reusability limited.
The Shape of Comprehensiveness: 13,000 Data Providers and counting.
In the world of science, it’s common to talk about big numbers. Citation counts, impact scores, and download figures often dominate the conversation, somewhat controversially. But numbers on their own rarely tell the full story unless they’re connected to purpose.
As of 4th August 2025, CORE (Connecting Repositories), has surged past the direct data provider mark, a milestone that underscores both our accelerated growth and truly global coverage. It’s tangible evidence of CORE’s constant growth and truly global coverage. Unlike some similar services, CORE’s figure reflects direct data providers, meaning that intermediaries such as DOAJ are counted once rather than tallying every individual journal, offering a clearer and more transparent measure of reach. At CORE, we actively curate, maintain, and support these data providers, ensuring they remain operational and fixing issues on a daily basis not only for our users, but for the benefit of the global repositories community. Unlike services that restrict themselves to content with registered (often paid-for) DOIs, we prioritise comprehensiveness and equal visibility of research outputs from all parts of the world. We share this number because it says something vital about the shape of open research and who is included in it. A perfect example is the groundbreaking paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which appears in CORE’s index via preprint repositories as a seminal work without a DOI, showcasing that critical research can be available outside of traditional commercial publishing channels.
Looking Back, Stepping Forward: 15 Years of CORE in the Open Access Movement
Fifteen years ago, CORE (COnnecting REpositories) began as a PhD project with a simple but ambitious idea: to make open research more accessible, not just for humans, but for machines too. At a time when few could imagine tools like ChatGPT answering questions based on vast collections of scientific literature, it was already clear that the future of knowledge would depend on infrastructure capable of delivering information in ways both people and machines could understand. What followed was a decade and a half of learning, building, listening and working with the global research community to shape a more open, intelligent, and discoverable world of knowledge.
CORE at 15: Together Building Open Access, Unlocking Global Knowledge
As of July 2025, CORE marks 15 years of supporting the global open access community through indexing and enriching research outputs. What began as a small-scale project has grown into the world’s largest open access indexing platform supporting over 10,000 repositories and journals, and making millions of full-text research outputs accessible to all.
Our anniversary, CORE at 15: Together Building Open Access, Unlocking Global Knowledge, is both a celebration and a recommitment to the mission that drives us: enabling unrestricted, global access to research.
CORE at Open Repositories 2025: Reflections from the Global Stage
Earlier this year, we shared our excitement ahead of the Open Repositories 2025 (OR2025) conference in Chicago. With a packed programme and growing momentum around open science infrastructure, CORE brought a series of contributions focused on the responsible use of AI, metadata innovation, and national-level repository coordination.
Now that the dust has settled and the conference has wrapped up, we’re taking a closer look at the sessions our team presented, the partnerships we strengthened, and the contributions we brought to the open repositories community. From addressing machine access to research content, metadata quality to AI-powered SDG classification and reproducibility, here’s a comprehensive summary of CORE’s significant presence at OR2025.