CORE users can now read articles directly on our site

We are happy to announce the release of CORE Reader, which provides a seamless experience for users wishing to read papers hosted by CORE. In this post, we provide an overview of what is new and we encourage you to follow this development as new functionalities in the reader are on our roadmap.

At the beginning of this project, there was a reflection that most open access services do not yet provide a rich user experience for reading research papers. Determined to change this, we originally started looking at whether CORE could render research papers as HTML, as has recently become trendy across publisher platforms. While such rendering remains to be one of the ultimate goals, we realised that this could only be achieved for a small fraction of documents in CORE. More specifically, those that the data provider offers in machine readable formats, such as LaTeX or JATS XML. While we want to encourage more repositories to support such formats (and this remains to be a Plan S recommendation), we wanted to improve the reading experience for all of our users across all of our content. read more...

CORE welcomes Plan S

CORE welcomes the objectives of Plan S to advance openness in all research subject fields as described in its ten principles. Plan S, which was initiated by a coalition of 11 European research funders aims to further the adoption of open access to European funded research. 

September 2018 saw the launch of Plan S, an initiative supported by the European Commission and various national public funding bodies (“cOAlitionS”) who, from 2020, will require that all articles by their grantees must be published immediately OA. The policy aims to accelerate the transition to OA with 10 principles and builds on an implementation guideline that aims to articulate a comprehensive operational roadmap for all stakeholders: funders, repositories, publishers and learned societies.  A revised guideline, following a public consultation, is due in May 2019.
read more...

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...

LA Referencia integrates CORE Recommender in its services

LA Referencia – an aggregator of research papers from Latin America collaborates with CORE – a scholarly communications infrastructure that provides access to the world’s largest collection of open access research publications, acquired from a global network of repositories and journals.

CORE Recommender is now integrated within  LA Referencia, allowing users to discover similar articles from across a network of thousand open access data providers. CORE Recommender acts as a gate to millions of open access research papers, suggesting relevant articles where the full text is guaranteed to be openly available. Moreover, the recommender delivers to users only free to read materials, i.e. materials that can be accessed without hitting a paywall. 
read more...

CORE Ambassador: Barbora Řebíková

BarboraBarbora is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Politology and Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic.

Q: What does Open Access mean to you?
A: Open Access is very important for us, i.e. academics, researchers and students, as we need to access plenty of relevant information to our interests all the time.

Q: How do you think CORE’s mission is important?/
A: As Sir Francis Bacon once said: “Knowledge is power”. So CORE’s mission is very important because it offers millions of open access full text to everyone for free, empowering everyone with access to knowledge and the knowledge itself. read more...

CORE wins an “Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity” Award

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 SheppardNick 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. read more...

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

GloriaGloria 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. read more...

CORE Ambassador: George Macgregor

George MacgregorGeorge 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. read more...