Author: nancypontika

A plea from CORE to Russian and Belarusian academic community to help stop the war in Ukraine

This blog post has been authored by Dr. Petr Knoth, CORE Head & Founder…

… with the kind support of everyone from the Ukrainian-based team: Kateryna, Viktoriia, Mariia, Valerii, Andrii, Iva, Konstantin and Anton, and

… with the support and proof-reading of the UK-based CORE team: Matteo, Nancy, David, Sam.

This post is our personal story of how members of the CORE team have been affected and caught up in the armed conflict in Ukraine. It is one of the many testaments to the implications of war and a plea to the Russian and Belarusian academic community to help stop this violence.  read more...

CORE Ambassador: Barbora Řebíková

BarboraBarbora is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Politology and Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic.

Q: What does Open Access mean to you?
A: Open Access is very important for us, i.e. academics, researchers and students, as we need to access plenty of relevant information to our interests all the time.

Q: How do you think CORE’s mission is important?/
A: As Sir Francis Bacon once said: “Knowledge is power”. So CORE’s mission is very important because it offers millions of open access full text to everyone for free, empowering everyone with access to knowledge and the knowledge itself. read more...

CORE Ambassador: Nick Sheppard

Nick SheppardNick has worked in scholarly communications for over 10 years, currently as Open Research Advisor at the University of Leeds. Previously he was Research Services Advisor at Leeds Beckett University. Nick is interested in effective dissemination of research through sustainable models of open access, including underlying data, and potential synergies with open education and Open Educational Resources (OER), particularly underlying technology, software and interoperability of systems.

Q: What does Open Access means to you?
A: We live in the age of information where the world’s knowledge should be immediately and easily accessible to the majority of humanity. Instead much primary research is restricted to those that can afford it, whether to read under traditional subscription models or, under an APC based model, to publish at all. Meanwhile fake news is propagated freely with potentially disastrous consequences for our democracy, our ecology and global equality. Sustainable and affordable open access to research is essential for a well informed global population, the first step to building a better society. 
With equity as the theme of this year’s Open Access week we will be exploring issues of equality including gender imbalance within the academy and how our University’s research can better benefit the Global South. Early plans include a gender analysis of Leeds research outputs and a Wikimedia editathon focussing on women scientists and encouraging researchers of all genders to properly cite Wikipedia with open access research. read more...

CORE Ambassador: Gloria Kadyamatimba

GloriaGloria is a lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Studies, Institute of Lifelong Learning and Development Studies at Chinhoyi University of Technology in Zimbabwe. She has special responsibility for coordinating the Information Literacy Skills component of the Communication Skills module. She is a former Library Director at the same institution.

Q: What does Open Access mean to you?
A: Open access means unlimited access to research materials and tools to publicise research and make it more visible to a wider audience. Open access means knowing  the research others are carrying out and making one’s research known to others.
In the past the Library was on the forefront of celebrating OA week. The  celebrations entailed having seminars with speakers from the Library and other experts from around the country. read more...

CORE Ambassador: George Macgregor

George MacgregorGeorge is an Institutional Repository Co-ordinator at the University of Strathclyde. His interests and expertise are in structured open data, especially within repositories and semantic web contexts, information retrieval, distributed digital repositories and human-computer interaction.

Q: What does Open Access mean to you?
A: Aside from the usual reasons why Open Access is important, I like to remember that Open Access is about resource discovery. It is about cracking open the sum total of human knowledge in a way that machines can understand and, by extension, providing it in a way which enables users to find scholarly content more easily and, of course, in an unrestricted way.
International Open Access Week is approaching soon but, to be honest, we don’t tend to have plans for Open Access week because at Strathclyde every week is Open Access week! I think there might be quite a few UK institutions that operate in a similar way. In the UK we are fortunate that there is a powerful regulatory aspect to the REF2021 Open Access Policy which ensures researchers take better notice of the open science agenda. read more...

CORE Ambassador: David Walters

David Walters, Brunel UniversityDavid is the Open Access Officer at Brunel University London based within the Scholarly Communication & Rights Management team. He is an advocate of OA publishing, and of building services that realise the movement within local institutional communities. David has spoken at UKSG, NASIG, RLUK and Altmetric conferences about this topic in recent years. David is an ambassador for the CORE service.

Q: What does Open Access mean to you?
A: To us at Brunel, Open Access means many things – ideologically and practically. Most importantly, we consider Open Access to research output a critical, underpinning component on the journey toward an ‘Open Science’ world. Open Science encompasses many areas, aiming to enhance scientific and educational sectors.
As with many institutions, at Brunel we operate local OA services for our community, within an ever-growing landscape of technological and policy drivers. Open Access means creating an environment that supports policy drivers, whilst advantaging new technologies for our community as they emerge.
Much progress is being driven by these factors. However, it is as important to foster discussion and leadership amongst research communities. Open Access means researchers and students shaping and leading their subjects into new forms of science communication and practice.
At Brunel our role in supporting Open Access is to:
– Engage and inform our community about these issues as they evolve
– Build and tailor services to our community’s needs
– Recognise and celebrate ‘open’ activity by our researchers in all its forms read more...

CORE Ambassador: Milica Sevkusic

MilicaMilica is a librarian at the Institute of Technical Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2007. Her education background is in art history and her previous work experience includes heritage policies and documentation standards, heritage-related civil society projects and digitisation, traditional librarianship and bibliography. Currently, her professional interests focus on Open Science, library services aimed at supporting research activities, training on academic services and tools, information literacy and research ethics. Since November 2014, she has been serving as the EIFL Open Access country coordinator in Serbia. In this capacity, she designed and coordinated the project – Revisiting open access journal policies and practices in Serbia, which was implemented with EIFL’s support in 2016–2017. She has also been involved with institutional repositories since 2013, when her affiliated institution implemented the first fully functional institutional repository in Serbia. She is now a member of the Repository Development Team at the University of Belgrade Computer Centre, which is currently the leading force in repository development in Serbia.
read more...

CORE enhances library discovery services

The CORE service is working in partnership with ProQuest to deliver more content within their library discovery services (Ex Libris Primo and Ex Libris Summon).  What does this mean for the end user?  This means that search results will bring back more relevant content from OA repositories worldwide in addition to the existing library collection records.  The user will not have to go to a separate search interface to run the same search query.

Read more…

CORE visits Ethiopia and participates in an Open Science training session

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In June 2017, EIFL invited the global open access full text aggregator CORE to take part in an Open Science train-the-trainer course for universities and research institutions in EIFL partner countries.

Watch the videos recorded during the workshop and read more…

Solomon Mekonnen – Open Access Ethiopia 

Zaituni Kaijage – Open Access Tanzania

Dr Roshan Karn – Open Access Nepal

Dr Manisha Dhakal – Open Access Nepal

Simon Osei – Open Access Ghana

Gloria Kadyamatimba – Open Access Zimbabwe

It was a great experience travelling to Addis Ababa and a big thanks to the workshop host, Library of the University of Addis Ababa (Mesfin Gezehagn, Solomon Mekonnen and Girma Aweke) for their hospitality. It was also great to meet the trainers participating in the workshop, from Ghana (Lucy Adjoa Dzandu, Simon Kwame Osei, Benjamin Yao Folitse), Nepal (Dr Manisha Dhakal and Dr Roshan Kumar Karn), Tanzania (Zaituni Kokujona Kaijage, Paul Samwel Muneja, Bwire Wilson Bwire) and Zimbabwe (Gloria Kadyamatimba).

 

Implementing the CORE Recommender in Strathprints: a “whitehat” improvement to promote user interaction

by George Macgregor, Institutional Repository Coordinator, University of Strathclyde

This guest blog post briefly reviews why the CORE Recommender was quickly adopted on Strathprints and how it has become a central part of our quest to improve the interactive qualities of repositories.

Back in October 2016 my colleagues at the CORE Team released their Recommender plugin. The CORE Recommender plugin can be installed on repositories and journal systems to recommend similar scholarly content. On this very blog, Nancy Pontika, Lucas Anastasiou and Petr Knoth, announced the release of the Recommender as a:

…great opportunity to improve the functionality of repositories by unleashing the power of recommendation over a huge collection of open-access documents, currently 37 million metadata records and more than 4 million full-text, available in CORE*.
(* Note from CORE Team: the up-to-date numbers are 80,097,014 metadata and 8,586,179 full-text records.).

When the CORE Recommender is deployed a repository user will find that as they are viewing an article or abstract page within the repository, they will be presented with recommendations for other related research outputs, all mined from CORE. The Recommender sends data about the item the user is visiting to CORE. Such data include any identifiers and, where possible, accompanying metadata. The CORE response to the repository then delivers CORE’s content recommendations and a list of suggested related outputs are presented to the user in the repository user interface. The algorithm used to compute these recommendations is described in the original CORE Recommender blog post but is ultimately based on content-based filtering, citation graph analysis and analysis of the semantic relatedness between the articles in the CORE aggregation. It is therefore unlike most standard recommender engines and is an innovative application of open science in repositories.

Needless to say, we were among the first institutions to proudly implement the CORE Recommender on our EPrints repository. The implementation was on Strathprints, the University of Strathclyde’s institutional repository, and was rolled out as part of some wider work to improve repository visibility and web impact. The detail of this other work can be found in a poster presented at the 2017 Repository Fringe Conference and

a recent blog post read more...