Category: Uncategorised

CORE published in Nature Scientific Data

We’re proud and excited to announce that the paper authored by our team entitled ‘CORE: a Global aggregation Service for Open access Papers’, was accepted for publication and is now available as an open access article via Nature.com.

This paper is the culmination of work by the whole CORE team, with contributions from team members both past and present. It discusses how CORE has grown from a research project initiated by Dr. Petr Knoth in 2010 to the service it is today, serving over 30 million unique users each month. The paper also elaborates on the continuously growing CORE dataset and details the systematic challenges associated with gathering research papers from thousands of data providers worldwide at an unprecedented scale and the novel solutions developed to address these challenges. read more...

Update on Delivering the CORE Membership Programme

We’re keen to update you with the latest developments as we continue to welcome more CORE Members and keep improving the tools and support for members while delivering on our mission to index all open access research worldwide. In March, we welcomed another six new institutions who have joined CORE as Supporting and Sustaining members; University of Exeter, Cardiff University, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Hull, University of Nottingham and University of Strathclyde. A huge thank you goes out to all of these amazing folks! read more...

CORE welcomes 10 new members

As part of our ongoing sustainability plan, in December 2022, we launched the CORE Membership program for data providers. CORE is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission and one of the signatories of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures POSI. Following the recently announced changes to our status, to remain free for public use, CORE is leveraging a membership model to help sustain its operations.  

We are therefore delighted today to announce that, in the very short time since the membership programme has launched, we have already welcomed ten institutions who have made a public and financial commitment to supporting Open Access infrastructure by becoming Supporting or Sustaining members of CORE.  read more...

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...