CORE update for January to March 2020

The first quarter of 2020 was a highly productive period for CORE in terms of growing and developing our products. Details about these and more news can be found below.

CORE is ready to release a premium version of the Repository Dashboard

The CORE team has developed a premium edition of the CORE Repository Dashboard, with a particular focus being on the development of features that support compliance assessment with the REF 2021 Open Access Audit.

The new CORE Repository Dashboard contains a brand new REF compliance and DOI enrichment tabs. This service has been developed to support Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) with repositories. More specifically, repository managers, research administrators, etc. The interface offers valuable technical information and statistics. Users can benefit from the tool by accessing information that will help them to improve the harvesting of their repository outputs and increase the visibility of their content. The premium edition is currently available to a limited number of users and we plan to expand to all interested institutions in the future. The release of the new version will be announced through a CORE blog-post. read more...

CORE makes open access more visible and reusable by being an enabling infrastructure

CORE is a global aggregator of open access research content, one of the Jisc’s Open Access services and UK’s National Aggregator. Through its services, CORE delivers a number of key measurable benefits to its stakeholders, such as institutions, repositories, and researchers. Moreover, CORE’s value is not only proved by its services, but by helping others with the delivery of specific use cases. Read more about how CORE acts as an enabling infrastructure, that allows for text mining, business intelligence, compliance monitoring and research analytics here. read more...

CORE Recommender installation for DSpace

In this blog post, Alex Efimov, Staff Engineer at the Research Office of the Ural Federal University, gives a step by step guide on how to install the CORE Recommender on DSpace. The post is also available in Russian

The CORE Recommender is a large and complex service, while its main purpose is to advance a repository by recommending similar articles. This blog post reviews only the plugin for a dspace/jspui based repository. The source of recommended data is the base of CORE, which consists of metadata descriptions and full texts. In addition, this plugin can recommend articles from the same repository as well. read more...

CORE welcomes a leading figure in the quest for Open Access to scientific knowledge

Last Tuesday, March 3, we were privileged at CORE to welcome a leading figure in the quest for Open Access to scientific knowledge. 


Last Tuesday, March 3, we were privileged at CORE to welcome a leading figure in the quest for Open Access to scientific knowledge. 

Professor Carl Malamud is a highly-regarded American technologist, author, and public domain advocate, known for his foundation Public.Resource.Org. He is on a crusade to liberate information locked up behind paywalls — and his campaigns have scored many victories. His mission is quite similar to CORE’s one, as we also work on aggregating all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public without hitting the paywall. Carl has spent decades publishing copyrighted legal documents, from building codes to court records, and then arguing that such texts represent public-domain law that ought to be available to any citizen online.  read more...

Are you an iOS user? Access scientific articles in your device without hitting a paywall

Another year has passed and left a lot of good news, investigations and developments for CORE. Today we would like to tell you about one of them – Open Access (OA) Helper, an application developed for iOS mobile devices by Claus Wolf. We asked Claus to tell us how he came up with the OA Helper and here is what he answered.

When, where and why did you decide to develop OA Helper app? 

In October 2018, I learned about how open access discovery services connect users to legal Open Access copies of otherwise paywalled articles. The available plugins weren’t available for Safari, my preferred browser, so I decided to give creating one a try. read more...

CORE update for October to December 2019

During the last quarter of 2019 CORE released new updates for two of its services, CORE Reader and CORE Discovery, and has initiated new collaborations, for example with LA Referencia. In addition, CORE was singled out for its contributions and was awarded for its outstanding impact of research on society and prosperity. Details about these and more news can be found below.

CORE won an Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award

During the Research Excellence Awards 2019 Ceremony dedicated to the 50th anniversary of The Open University, CORE was presented with the award for “Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award”. This important award reflects the clear value CORE represents to its millions of users as the largest repository of Open Access scientific knowledge. read more...

CORE users can now read articles directly on our site

We are happy to announce the release of CORE Reader, which provides a seamless experience for users wishing to read papers hosted by CORE. In this post, we provide an overview of what is new and we encourage you to follow this development as new functionalities in the reader are on our roadmap.

At the beginning of this project, there was a reflection that most open access services do not yet provide a rich user experience for reading research papers. Determined to change this, we originally started looking at whether CORE could render research papers as HTML, as has recently become trendy across publisher platforms. While such rendering remains to be one of the ultimate goals, we realised that this could only be achieved for a small fraction of documents in CORE. More specifically, those that the data provider offers in machine readable formats, such as LaTeX or JATS XML. While we want to encourage more repositories to support such formats (and this remains to be a Plan S recommendation), we wanted to improve the reading experience for all of our users across all of our content. read more...

CORE welcomes Plan S

CORE welcomes the objectives of Plan S to advance openness in all research subject fields as described in its ten principles. Plan S, which was initiated by a coalition of 11 European research funders aims to further the adoption of open access to European funded research. 

September 2018 saw the launch of Plan S, an initiative supported by the European Commission and various national public funding bodies (“cOAlitionS”) who, from 2020, will require that all articles by their grantees must be published immediately OA. The policy aims to accelerate the transition to OA with 10 principles and builds on an implementation guideline that aims to articulate a comprehensive operational roadmap for all stakeholders: funders, repositories, publishers and learned societies.  A revised guideline, following a public consultation, is due in May 2019.
read more...

Releasing a new CORE Discovery browser extension

CORE Discovery helps users find freely accessible copies of research papers that might be behind a paywall on the publisher’s website. It is backed by our huge dataset of millions of full text open access papers as well as content from widely used external services beyond CORE. The tool not only provides state-of-the-art coverage of freely available content, it is the only discovery service which:

  • delivers state-of-the-art performance compared to other discovery tools in terms of both content coverage (finding a freely available copy when it is available) and precision (reliably delivering a free copy of the paper on success);
  • is run by researchers for researchers (as opposed to companies);
  • has the best grip on content from the global network of open repositories;
  • can deliver to readers other relevant freely available research papers even in situations where a freely available version is not available from anywhere on the web.

To satisfy the needs of CORE users, the world’s largest global aggregator of open access research papers now helps users access articles of their interest. Generally, discovery tools can find typically free copies of papers for about 15%-30% of published documents (slide 11). This means that in more than 70% of cases, they don’t bring to the user anything useful. CORE Discovery can offer the user relevant documents even in situations where other discovery tools are not successful. What distinguishes CORE Discovery from other discovery services on the market is that it does not stop when an open access version is not available, but always aims to offer related open access articles to the end user. read more...