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.
Gloria 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.
George 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.
CORE Discovery, a browser extension that offers one-click access to free copies of research papers whenever you might hit a paywall, is now published in Mozilla and Opera Stores. The plug in was originally released as a Google Chrome extension.
CORE was active at the Open Science Fair 2019, an international event for all topics related to Open Science. CORE had two posters at this event; a general to the CORE service poster, which updated the community about the full text growth and wide usage of the CORE services, and a second one about the eduTDM.
David 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
Milica 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.
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 has released a BETA version of the CORE Discovery tool, which offers a one-click access to free copies of research papers whenever you might hit a paywall.
Our free CORE Discovery service provides you with:
The tool is available as:
If you are interested in the CORE Discovery plugin do get in touch.
The CORE team has also won the Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at JCDL 2019, one of the most highly recognised digital libraries conference in the world, for our work on analysing how soon authors deposit into repositories, which was driven by CORE data. A blog post about this is already available.
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.
. More specifically, over the last 3 months CORE had more than 25 million users, tripling our usage compared to 2017. According to