Category: CORE

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 wins The Research Excellence Awards!

On October 23rd, The Open University held the Research Excellence Awards 2019  Ceremony. CORE was presented with the award for “Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity” This important award reflects the clear value CORE represents to its users.
You can read more about the ceremony and the award at the KMi Planet News.

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...

Using CORE Discovery in DSpace

Update 25.07.2019: Alex has created a guide for the CORE Discovery in Russian, which can be found at the ideafix.name blog.

During the Open Repositories 2019 conference CORE launched CORE Discovery, a service providing one-click access to free copies of research papers. The service is available as a browser extension as well as a repository plugin, which is what we will discuss in this blog post. We received plenty of interest from repository managers for this repository plugin which provides access to full texts on metadata only repository pages. One of them was Alex Efimov, a Staff Engineer at Ural Federal University who has shared his experience in installing the tool in DSpace. read more...

CORE highly visible at Open Repositories 2019 conference

CORE participated at the Open Repositories conference (10 – 13 June 2019), which took place in Hamburg, Germany. This year’s conference theme was “All the user needs”, where CORE received much attention and participated actively with 5 presentations. 

Assessing Compliance with the UK REF 2021 Open Access Policy

The recent increase in Open Access (OA) policies has brought forth important questions concerning the effect these policies have on the practice of publishing Open Access. In particular, is there evidence to support that mandating OA increases the proportion of OA outputs (in other words, do authors comply with relevant policies)? Furthermore, does mandating OA reduce the time from acceptance to the public availability of research outputs, and can compliance with OA mandates be effectively tracked? This work studies compliance with the UK REF 2021 Open Access policy. We use data from CrossRef and from CORE to create a dataset containing 1.6 million publications. We show that after the introduction of the UK OA policy, the proportion of OA research outputs in the UK has increased significantly, and the time lag between the acceptance of a publication and its Open Access availability has decreased, although there are significant differences in compliance between different repositories. We have developed a tool that can be used to assess publications’ compliance with the policy based on a list of DOIs. read more...

CORE becomes the world’s largest open access aggregator (or how about them stats 2018 edition)

This was another productive year for the CORE team; our content providers have increased, along with our metadata and full text records. This makes CORE the world’s largest open access aggregator

. More specifically, over the last 3 months CORE had more than 25 million users, tripling our usage compared to 2017. According to read more...

Increasing the Speed of Harvesting with On Demand Resource Dumps

 

I am currently working with Martin Klein, Matteo Cancellieri and Herbert Van de Sompel on a project funded by the European Open Science Cloud Pilot that aims to test and benchmark ResourceSync against OAI-PMH in a range of scenarios. The objective is to perform a quantitative evaluation that could then be used as evidence to convince data providers to adopt ResourceSync. During this work, we have encountered a problem related to the scalability of ResourceSync and developed a solution to it in the form of an On Demand Resource Dump. The aim of this blog post is to explain the problem, how we arrived to the solution and how the solution works.

The problem

One of the scenarios we have been exploring deals with a situation where the resources to be synchronised are metadata files of a small data size (typically from a few bytes to several kilobytes). Coincidentally, this scenario is very common for metadata in repositories of academic manuscripts, research data (e.g. descriptions of images), cultural heritage, etc.

The problem is related to the issue that while most OAI-PMH implementations typically deliver 100-1000 responses per one HTTP request, ResourceSync is designed in a way that requires resolving each resource individually. We have identified and confirmed by testing that for repositories with larges numbers of metadata items, this can have a very significant impact on the performance of harvesting, as the overhead of the HTTP request is considerable compared to the size of the metadata record.

More specifically, we have run tests over a sample of 357 repositories. The results of these tests show that while the speed of OAI-PMH harvesting ranges from 30-520 metadata records per second, depending largely on the repository platform, the speed of harvesting by ResourceSync is somewhere in the range of only 4 metadata records per second for harvesting the same content using existing ResourceSync client/server implementations and sequential downloading strategy. We are preparing a paper on this, so I am not going to disclose the exact details of the analysis at this stage.

As ResourceSync has been created to overcome many of the problems of OAI-PMH, such as:

  • being too flexible in terms of support for incremental harvesting, resulting in inconsistent implementations of this feature across data providers,
  • some of its implementations being unstable and less suitable for exchanging large quantities of metadata and
  • being only designed for metadata transfer, omitting the much needed support for content exchange

it is important that Resource Sync performs well under all common scenarios, including the one we are dealing with.

Can Resource Dumps be the solution?

An obvious option for solving the problem that is already offered by ResourceSync are Resource Dumps. While a Resource Dump can speed up harvesting to levels far exceeding those of OAI-PMH, it creates some considerable extra complexity on the side of the server. The key problem is that it creates the necessity to periodically package the data as a Resource Dump, which basically means running a batch process to produce a compressed (zip) file containing the resources.

The number of Resource Dumps a source needs to maintain is equal to the number of Capability Lists it maintains times the size of the Resource Dump Index. The minimum practical operational size of a Resource Dump Index is 2. This is to ensure we don’t remove a dump currently being downloaded by a client during the creation of a new dump. As we have observed that a typical repository may contain about 250 OAI-PMH sets (Capability Lists in the ResourceSync terminology), this implies the need for a significant data duplication and requirements on period creation of Resource Dumps if a source chose to use Resource Dumps as part of the harvesting process.

On Demand Resource Dumps

To deal with the problem, we suggest an extension of ResourceSync that will support the concept of an On Demand Resource Dump. An On Demand Resource Dump is a Resource Dump which is created, as the name suggests, whenever a client asks for it. More specifically, a client can scan through the list of resources presented in a Resource List or a Change List (without resolving them individually) and request from the source to package any set of the resources as a Resource Dump. This approach speeds up and saves processing on the side of both the source as well as the client. Our initial tests show that this enables ResourceSync to perform as well as OAI-PMH in the metadata only harvesting scenario when requests are sent sequentially (the most extreme scenario for ResourceSync). However, as ResourceSync requests can be parallelised, as opposed to OAI-PMH (due to the reliance of OAI-PMH on the resumption token), this makes ResourceSync a clear winner.

In the rest of this post, I will explain how this works and how it could be integrated with the ResourceSync specification.

There are basically 3 steps:

  1. defining that the server supports an on-demand Resource Dump,
  2. sending a POST request to the on-demand dump endpoint and
  3. receiving a response from the server that 100% conforms to the Resource Dump specification.

I will first introduce steps 2 and 3 and then I will come back to step 1.

Step 2: sending a POST request to the On Demand dump endpoint

We have defined an endpoint at https://core.ac.uk/datadump . You can POST it a list of resource identifiers (which can be discovered in a Resource List). In the example below, I am using curl to send it a list of resource identifiers in JSON which I want to get resolved. Obviously, the approach is not limited to JSON, it can be used for any resource listed in a Resource List regardless of its type. Try it by executing the code below in your terminal.

curl -d ‘[“https://core.ac.uk/api-v2/articles/get/42138752″,”https://core.ac.uk/api-v2/articles/get/32050″]‘ -H “Content-Type: application/json” https://core.ac.uk/datadump -X POST > on-demand-resource-dump.zip read more...