Professor Petr Knoth was selected by the CHIST-ERA organisers as one of four Open Science panellists in the first part of the Seminar. The other panelists included David Camacho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Project MARTINI & Open Science Ambassador), Sabine Kraml (Université Grenoble Alpes, Project OpenMAPP & Open Science Ambassador), and Joanna Watt (EPSRC, UKRI, Research Funding Agency representative). The panel discussed the main challenges and gaps in Open Science. Among these, Professor Knoth particularly highlighted:
Category: CORE
CORE at Open Repositories 2025: Unlocking Insights and Empowering Open Access
CORE will be contributing seven accepted submissions to the 20th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2025), taking place in Chicago, Illinois, USA, from 15–18 June 2025. These presentations highlight ongoing efforts to enhance open access, improve research discoverability, and address key challenges in the open repositories community.
From managing machine access in the era of generative AI to improving research classification and repository interoperability, each submission provides valuable insights for repository managers, academic institutions, and the wider open access ecosystem.
CORE presents SoFAIR project at UNESCO
Last week saw CORE founder Professor Petr Knoth at UNESCO in Paris for the 2025 Software Heritage Symposium and summit. Professor Knoth was presenting the work undertaken in the first year of the SoFAIR project, a two-year multinational CHIST-ERA project. The Open University is working in conjunction with multiple partners including INRIA, Brno University of Technology, the Polish Academy of Sciences and Europe PMC. SoFAIR will improve and semi-automate the process for identifying, describing, registering and archiving research software, ensuring it has received a Software Heritage persistent identifier.
CORE receives funding from Microsoft’s Open Data Initiative
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:
Introducing the SDG Classification Module for the CORE Dashboard
Figure 1: SDG Classification in the CORE Dashboard
A Novel Tool for SDG Research Classification
We are pleased to announce the launch of the UN SDG Classification Module for the CORE Dashboard, a purpose-driven tool designed to streamline and automate the process of classifying academic research according to these goals. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 17 global objectives adopted in 2015 to address key challenges such as poverty, inequality, and environmental sustainability. They aim to promote inclusive development, economic growth, and environmental protection, with the overarching goal of ensuring no one is left behind by 2030. Each goal includes specific targets to guide global action towards a more sustainable and equitable future.
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.
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 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.
CORE at Open Repositories 2024
This summer the 19th annual Open Repositories Conference will take place from June 3rd to 6th at the Clarion Post Hotel in Gothenburg, Sweden. Over 300 submissions were received this year and the CORE team will be in attendance, presenting several areas of the work we have been undertaking over the last few months.
We will be introducing our work as coordinators for the SoFAIR (Making Software FAIR: A machine-assisted workflow for the research software lifecycle) project, a two-year CHIST-ERA funded project which will improve and semi-automate the process for identifying, describing, registering and archiving research software.