CORE to become an independent Open Access service from August 2023

Jisc and The Open University have had a long-standing relationship delivering CORE (core.ac.uk) for over 10 years. During this time, the service has grown from a project to an important and widely used Open Research infrastructure.  

The current Jisc – OU contract for delivering CORE to the open scholarly community is expiring in July 2023. From this time onwards CORE will be operated by The Open University and will no longer receive direct funding from Jisc. The Open University is grateful to Jisc for its support of CORE over the last ten years.  read more...

Major update of CORE search 

CORE has just released a major update to its search engine, including a sleek new user interface and upgraded search functionality driven by the new CORE API V3.0.

CORE Search is the engine that researchers, librarians, scholars, and others turn to for open access research papers from around the world and for staying up to date on the latest scientific literature.

CORE constantly evaluates feedback from users and integrates this feedback as a part of the ongoing roadmap for CORE’s continued development. Working with our users and data providers to deliver a consistently improving user experience is a key component in CORE’s ongoing success. read more...

A plea from CORE to Russian and Belarusian academic community to help stop the war in Ukraine

This blog post has been authored by Dr. Petr Knoth, CORE Head & Founder…

… with the kind support of everyone from the Ukrainian-based team: Kateryna, Viktoriia, Mariia, Valerii, Andrii, Iva, Konstantin and Anton, and

… with the support and proof-reading of the UK-based CORE team: Matteo, Nancy, David, Sam.

This post is our personal story of how members of the CORE team have been affected and caught up in the armed conflict in Ukraine. It is one of the many testaments to the implications of war and a plea to the Russian and Belarusian academic community to help stop this violence.  read more...

How does CORE substitute Microsoft Academic Graph?

The forest chatter has been clamorous since Microsoft’s announcement to retire Microsoft Academic (MAG) at the end of 2021. Like many others, at CORE, we have used MAG for a number of tasks including data quality enhancement and enrichment, to obtain citation data, for our research in semantic typing of citations and to enrich MAG and Microsoft Academic Search by supplying direct links to full-text content (in a similar way we do for PubMed).

Continue reading this blog post on the Jisc Research Blog. read more...

Looking forward to REF2026

Posted 1st April 2021. You’ll probably be glad to know that, thankfully, none of what follows is actually true. We do hope however it brought even a weak smile to your REF-weary faces. We, like you, are at the behest of far greater and more powerful forces so, when and if REF2026 comes around, we’ll be hanging on for the ride too! Happy holidays to those lucky enough to get some time off over the next couple of weeks. read more...

CORE update for October to December 2020

October to December 2020 CORE broke records, partnered with arXiv.org and continued improving our REF2021 compliance monitoring service. The CORE team had a busy end to 2020! 

Our team concentrated on multiple areas, including collaboration with the open access community and new feature development. Find out more details on Jisc Research Blog.

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...

CORE releases a new website version

A couple of days ago we released a new version of our website and if you visit our main page it now looks slightly different.

Image: blickpixel @ pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/lego-legomaennchen-males-workers-568039/

One of our aims was to showcase in a more clear way the CORE testimonials, i.e. what others think of the project and how the community uses our products, mainly our API and Datasets. In an effort to give credit to the universities and companies

that are using our services, such as our read more...

Analysing ORCID coverage across repositories through CORE

* This post was authored by Matteo Cancellieri, Petr Knoth and Nancy Pontika.

Last month, CORE attended the JISC ORCID hackday events in Birmingham and London. (ORCID is a non-profit organisation that aims to solve the author disambiguation problem by offering unique author identifiers). Following the discussions that sparked off at the two events, we decided to test the CORE data towards ORCID’s API and we discovered some information that we think is of interest to the scholarly community.

Currently, CORE has data for 5.5 million unique Document Object Identifiers (DOIs) linked to records in our database (both metadata only and full text). Based on this number, we wanted to find out how many of these DOIs were connected to an ORCID id. Therefore, we set up a script that called the ORCID API obeying to the rate limit. In around 7 days we had collected the full results.
From the 5,523,577 articles with a DOI that existed in the CORE collection, we discovered that 196,713 different authors had an ORCID id, and 927,645 articles included at list one ORCID id.

map
Credits to Aristotelis Charalampous for helping us generate this really cool map visualisation

We found that 16% of the DOIs in CORE are connected to at least one author registered in ORCID. The following map shows the distribution of the ORCID ids discovered across the world.

Why is this useful? It enables us to assess the ORCID’s coverage across a large multidisciplinary dataset of Open Access papers. Doing some more digging in the data (we haven’t done this yet), it would also be possible to analyse the growth of ORCID over time. These data can be sliced and diced according to various criteria, such as geographical coverage or repository, to understand how ORCID coverage can be improved.

Based on our results, the UK has the biggest number of ORCID IDs. However, this result is a bit skewed by the fact that CORE has an excellent content coverage across UK repositories.

We also tried to find authors with ORCID IDs who deposited content in one of the UK repositories. Our result indicates that 68,849 ORCIDs were discovered from 254,467 unique DOIs. It was then very useful to look at the distribution of the top 15 repositories based on ORCID IDs across the UK repositories. This analysis can be extremely helpful in identifying repositories with low ORCID coverage and encouraging them to take an appropriate action.
orcid_by_repo

Repositories implementing RIOXX have already the possibility to expose ORCID IDs through an attribute in the rioxxterm:author tag. While this opportunity exists, our quick survey showed that only few repositories supporting RIOXX have implemented it. Thanks to John Salter, Software Developer at Leeds University, for his help in collecting the data and creating the chart. John is currently working on including the ORCID IDs in the White Rose repository, which “forced” us 🙂 to use a log-scale in the chart due to the widespread implementation of the ID attribute in their metadata (>6k ORCID IDs vs less than 10 IDs from the other repositories)

rioxx_vs_orcid_api

Highlights

Dataset

We have made the dataset available online on Github and it can be found here .
There are few caveats in the data that must be taken into consideration. Our main challenge was that some of the aggregated DOIs were not valid or pointing to a journal instead of a paper. The ORCID API returned only a partial match and in the case of the journals’ DOIs, this meant that the ORCID IDs returned results that regarded all the authors of one journal instead of one specific paper.

What next?

In this preliminary study we realised that the information we extracted from the data was useful to us and, perhaps, could be useful to repository managers. Our plan is to design and implement a new functionality in the CORE Repositories Dashboard. We are planning to submit a proposal for this to OR2017 and we would really appreciate your feedback. If you are a repository manager and you want to know more, contact us.