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:
Category: CORE
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.
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.
How the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) uses the CORE API
Jason Partridge – Open Access Service Manager at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
One of the fundamental functions of CORE is to support Open Access. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is through automated data gathering, using the CORE API. CORE harvests and aggregates information of research papers collected from institutional and subject repositories, and from open access and hybrid journals, and makes the content available via an API (Application Programming Interface). The CORE API offers a wealth of metadata and full text content from its many data providers.
AI for the Research Ecosystem: a KMi workshop at the AI UK Fringe 2024
CORE is a part of The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) here at The Open University. As part of the Turing Institute’s AI UK Fringe event series, Professor Petr Knoth and Dr David Pride from CORE are working together with Professor Enrico Motta and Dr Angelo Salatino from KMi and Dr Aldo Lipani from UCL to organise the “AI for the Research Ecosystem” (AI4RE) workshop which will highlight the rapid evolution of AI and its significant impact on the entire research process.
Technologies like deep learning and large language models are poised to transform various stages of research, including study design, literature reviews, code design, data collection and analysis, dissemination, peer review, and research assessment. The workshop aims to provide insights from expert speakers across the research spectrum, involving researchers, institutions, policymakers, funders, and commercial entities. The event serves as a catalyst for addressing fundamental questions about the implications of AI developments for the research community, emphasizing the need for responsible and ethical AI design and usage. Additionally, the workshop aims to explore how stakeholders can best organize and democratize these AI technologies for the benefit of the research ecosystem.
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.
CORE runner-up at Open University Research Excellence Awards 2022 
The annual OU Research Excellence Awards highlight the diverse research undertaken at the OU and recognise the impact that this research has for the economy, the environment, and society as a whole. More than 250 Open University (OU) staff, students, funders and partners came together in London on the 22nd September for this year’s awards.
We are extremely pleased that the CORE team was announced as runner-up in the highly-contested ‘Best External Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange Award’ for its knowledge exchange activities with a diverse range of external partners spanning from innovators, AI technology companies, digital library providers, plagiarism detection providers, academic social networks, funders and others, including its over decade long partnership with Jisc, the digital solutions provider for UK education and research. CORE received a small financial award to support research activities from the OU in recognition of this achievement.