The team continues to work on improving the CORE. This period was a highly productive period for CORE in terms of growing and developing our products.
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CORE follows its mission and makes open access more visible and reusable by being an enabling infrastructure. This time CORE joins its forces with Lean Library, whose aim is to provide seamless access to research materials for users. Due to this collaboration with Lean Library, the CORE Discovery service will now be indirectly used by library systems integrating Lean Library, thereby reaching more users. More information about this integration can be found here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.