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SoFAIR study paper accepted to JCDL2025

The Open University is the project coordinator for the 2-year CHIST-ERA funded SoFAIR project which aims to make research software a first-class, FAIR research object (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).

We are excited to share that our paper, “Identifying and Classifying Software Mentions in Full-Text Scholarly Documents,” has been accepted for presentation at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2025). This work reports the first systematic evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for detecting and classifying software mentions in research papers. Using benchmark datasets, SoftCite, SoMeSci, and the new SoFAIR corpus the study compares different prompting and retrieval strategies, showing that LLM-based approaches substantially outperform previous rule-based and conventional NLP methods, particularly across a multi-disciplinary corpus. The work demonstrates the potential for LLMs to move software-mention detection from a research challenge toward a deployable capability, capable of extracting software names, versions, and publishers. read more...

We Are Open Access And We’re Reclaiming Knowledge Together

This International Open Access Week, the global research community is asking a vital question: Who owns our knowledge?

At CORE (COnnecting REpositories), our answer is clear and unapologetic:
We all do.

For over a decade, CORE has stood at the forefront of the open access movement, not as a passive service, but as an active builder of open scholarly infrastructure that enables research ideas to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) in a free, visible, and inclusive manner. We don’t just support open access. We are open access. read more...

Co-Designing the Next 15 Years: Highlights from CORE’s Board of Supporters Meeting

Twice each year, CORE’s Board of Supporters (BoS) meeting brings together our members, partners, and collaborators to exchange ideas, share progress, and shape the priorities that guide our development. The October 2025 meeting marked yet another successful, well-attended session and the second of two such gatherings this year. It served as a powerful reminder of how community governance has been central to CORE’s growth and sustainability, and celebrated our 15th anniversary.

Over the years, CORE has evolved from a national repository service to one of the world’s leading open scholarly infrastructures. This success is rooted in the principles of openness, co-design, and shared responsibility, values we continue to uphold through the Board of Supporters. read more...

CORE Founder to Present at Yale University CS Talk Series

We’re pleased to share that Professor Petr Knoth, Founder and Head of CORE (core.ac.uk) and Professor of Data Science at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute, will be giving a Computer Science Talk at Yale University on 13 October 2025.

In his talk, titled “COnnecting REpositories (CORE) an open scholarly infrastructure by researchers for researchers,”Petr will introduce CORE’s role in advancing global open scholarship. He will highlight how CORE supports discoverability, interoperability, and machine access to research outputs, while also showcasing innovations from the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group (BSDTAG) including CORE-GPT, SDG: Classify, and SoFAIR. read more...

Discovering History, Powered by CORE

Every research article, thesis, and working paper, accessible to anyone, anywhere. That’s the reality CORE has been building for 15 years, making knowledge discoverable and usable for students, educators, researchers, and curious minds across the globe.

“It’s extraordinary to witness how CORE (COnnecting REpositories) has become a resource that can be embedded into new innovative applications that can benefit from access to reliable research information,” says Petr Knoth, Head of CORE. read more...

From Principles to Practice – A UKCORR webinar

On 25 September 2025, CORE was invited by the UK Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR) to present a webinar for their members, titled “From Principles to Practice: Making Repository Content Discoverable with the CORE Data Provider’s Guide.” The session focused on one of the most pressing challenges for repository managers, namely ensuring that their content is not just indexed but is also visible, accessible, and interoperable across the global scholarly ecosystem. The webinar introduced the CORE Data Provider’s Guide, a structured, three-layered framework covering best-practice in three distinct areas; repository configuration, metadata configuration, and full-text configuration. read more...

Sustaining Open Infrastructure: How Funding Mechanisms Safeguard Open Access

Across the globe, higher education institutions are navigating intense financial pressures. Rising inflation, frozen tuition fees, and the increasing costs of digital services are stretching budgets thin. For repository managers and librarians, these pressures often translate into tough decisions about which services to keep and which to cut. In this context, open access infrastructure like CORE (COnnecting REpositories) can sometimes appear to be a “nice-to-have” rather than a necessity. But in reality, services like CORE are not luxuries; they are essential infrastructure that keeps research visible, discoverable, and compliant. read more...

OCLC expands global partnerships with CORE sponsorship agreement

OCLC has announced a sponsorship agreement with CORE (COnnecting REpositories), expanding OCLC’s commitment to supporting open access research infrastructure worldwide. This partnership builds on OCLC’s recent agreements with organizations including the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA).

CORE is a not-for-profit service that provides access to millions of open access research papers in their comprehensive database. The service supports libraries, researchers, and institutions in discovering and accessing scholarly content. read more...

Making Research Software FAIR: How SoFAIR Tackles the Reproducibility Challenge

Reproducibility is one of the significant challenges of contemporary science. A landmark survey revealed that more than 70% of researchers had failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than 50% were unable to reproduce their own (Baker, 2016).

“Single occurrences that cannot be reproduced are of no significance to science.” (Popper, 1935)

One of the less visible, but increasingly critical, factors contributing to this problem is the visibility and availability of research software. Software now underpins almost every stage of the research lifecycle from data collection and analysis to simulation, modelling, and visualisation. Yet despite its centrality, research software often remains hidden within manuscripts, mentioned fleetingly or omitted altogether. Without proper identification and registration, software is rarely linked back to the publications that introduced or used it, leaving its role in scientific discovery under-recognised and its reusability limited. read more...

The Shape of Comprehensiveness: 13,000 Data Providers and counting.

In the world of science, it’s common to talk about big numbers. Citation counts, impact scores, and download figures often dominate the conversation, somewhat controversially. But numbers on their own rarely tell the full story unless they’re connected to purpose.

As of 4th August 2025, CORE (Connecting Repositories), has surged past the direct data provider mark, a milestone that underscores both our accelerated growth and truly global coverage. It’s tangible evidence of CORE’s constant growth and truly global coverage. Unlike some similar services, CORE’s figure reflects direct data providers, meaning that intermediaries such as DOAJ are counted once rather than tallying every individual journal, offering a clearer and more transparent measure of reach. At CORE, we actively curate, maintain, and support these data providers, ensuring they remain operational and fixing issues on a daily basis not only for our users, but for the benefit of the global repositories community. Unlike services that restrict themselves to content with registered (often paid-for) DOIs, we prioritise comprehensiveness and equal visibility of research outputs from all parts of the world. We share this number because it says something vital about the shape of open research and who is included in it. A perfect example is the groundbreaking paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which appears in CORE’s index via preprint repositories as a seminal work without a DOI, showcasing that critical research can be available outside of traditional commercial publishing channels. read more...