In this video interview Petr Knoth comments on CORE’s win of the “Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity” Award, while Balviar Notay, Jisc, explains Jisc’s and CORE’s common working ground and achievements. Read more about this event at the Jisc scholarly communications blog post.
CORE Ambassador: Nick Sheppard
Nick has worked in scholarly communications for over 10 years, currently as Open Research Advisor at the University of Leeds. Previously he was Research Services Advisor at Leeds Beckett University. Nick is interested in effective dissemination of research through sustainable models of open access, including underlying data, and potential synergies with open education and Open Educational Resources (OER), particularly underlying technology, software and interoperability of systems.
Q: What does Open Access means to you?
A: We live in the age of information where the world’s knowledge should be immediately and easily accessible to the majority of humanity. Instead much primary research is restricted to those that can afford it, whether to read under traditional subscription models or, under an APC based model, to publish at all. Meanwhile fake news is propagated freely with potentially disastrous consequences for our democracy, our ecology and global equality. Sustainable and affordable open access to research is essential for a well informed global population, the first step to building a better society.
With equity as the theme of this year’s Open Access week we will be exploring issues of equality including gender imbalance within the academy and how our University’s research can better benefit the Global South. Early plans include a gender analysis of Leeds research outputs and a Wikimedia editathon focussing on women scientists and encouraging researchers of all genders to properly cite Wikipedia with open access research.
CORE wins The Research Excellence Awards!
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.
CORE Ambassador: Gloria Kadyamatimba
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.
CORE Ambassador: George Macgregor
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 update for July to September 2019
CORE releases CORE Discovery in Mozilla and Opera browsers
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 presents its full texts growth and introduces eduTDM at Open Science Fair 2019
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.
CORE Ambassador: David Walters
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
CORE Ambassador: Milica Sevkusic
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.
Using CORE Discovery in DSpace
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 update for April to June 2019
CORE releases CORE Discovery tool
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:
- Highest coverage of freely available content. Our tests have shown CORE Discovery finding more free content than any other discovery system.
- Free service for researchers by researchers. CORE Discovery is the only free content discovery extension developed by researchers for researchers. There is no major publisher or enterprise controlling and profiting from your usage data.
- Best grip on open repository content. Due to CORE being a leader in harvesting open access literature, CORE Discovery has the best grip on open content from open repositories as opposed to other services that disproportionately focus only on content indexed in major commercial databases.
- Repository integration and discovering documents without a DOI. The only service offering seamless and free integration into repositories. CORE Discovery is also the only discovery system that can locate scientific content even for items with an unknown DOI or which do not have a DOI.
The tool is available as:
- A browser extension for researchers and anyone interested in reading scientific documents
- Plugin for repositories, enriching metadata only pages in repositories with links to freely available copies of the paper
- API for developers and third party services
If you are interested in the CORE Discovery plugin do get in touch.
CORE receives Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award
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.