Last week, the CORE team attended the 11th Annual Conference on Open Repositories, an international conference addressed mainly to subject and institutional repository managers, focusing on open access, open data and open science tools, projects and services.

At the conference the team had six submissions:

1. A workshop presentation on “How can repositories support the text-mining of their content and why?” where Nancy Pontika explained how repository managers should be supportive of text-mining practices and Petr Knoth described the technical requirements that can enable the text mining of repositories. In addition to that, the CORE team was the workshop organiser, as part of its involvement with the OpenMinTeD project, an EU-funded project on text and data mining. The workshop has been described in two blog posts, one hosted at the OpenMinTeD blog (which includes all workshop presentations), and another post composed by Rebecca Sutton Koeser, a workshop participant.

2. A full presentation on “Exploring Semantometrics: full text-based research evaluation for open repositories” by Petr Knoth. The presentation explored semantometrics, a new class of research evaluation metrics, which builds on the premise that full text is needed to assess the value of a publication. (Presentation available here.)

3. A 24×7 presentation on the “Implementation of the RIOXX metadata guidelines in the UK’s repositories through a harvesting service”, where Matteo Cancellieri and Nancy Pontika described how the RIOXX metadata guidelines are now a new embedded feature in the CORE Repositories Dashboard. (Presentation slides here.)

4. & 5. Two demo presentations during the Developer Track sessions. The first one was on “Mining Open Access Publications in CORE”, where Matteo Cancellieri demonstrated the new CORE API and the second was entitled “Oxford vs Cambridge Contest: Collecting Open Research Evaluation Metrics for University Ranking” where Petr Knoth used the traditional Oxford University vs Cambridge University contest to show how to freely gather and compare the research performance of universities. (The code for both demo presentations is on Github.)

6. A poster on the “Integration of the IRUS-UK Statistics in the CORE Repositories Dashboard”, by Samuel Pearce and Nancy Pontika, which showed the process of embedding the existing IRUS-UK statistics service to the CORE Repositories Dashboard. We were delighted also that our poster won the best poster award (yay!). We would like to thank all the conference participants who stopped by our poster, got the CORE freebies and voted for us! (You can access the poster here.)

Based on the fact that this conference has a clear focus on repository services and that the CORE service uses or is being used by these services, we were also extensively mentioned in other presentations as well. For example: Richard Jones in his presentation on Lantern mentioned that the project is using the CORE API; Paul Walk described how CORE is using the RIOXX metadata application profile; the Repositories of the Future panel, organised by COAR, stressed on the importance of the role of aggregators in the repository environment specifically naming CORE; and the “Ideas Challenge”, a thought-provoking and brainstorming group exercise consisting of programmers and repository managers that focused on how to make the lives of academics easier, proposed CORE as a runner up for the development of a cross-repository journal and topic browse interface. Finally, CORE was also presented in the Jisc poster on “Jisc’s Open Access Services”. read more...