In November, there was a whole-day workshop held at the headquarters of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) in London on the topic of article-level persistent identifiers (PIDs) in the context of the UKRI OA Policy. There were representatives from HEIs, UKRI, and scholarly services providers, including Crossref and Cosector (host repositories). Professor Petr Knoth, together with Dr George Macgregor from the University of Glasgow, gave a presentation on the use of article-level identifiers in repositories.
CORE celebrates PhD. viva success for Suchetha Nambanoor-Kunnath
The whole CORE team were delighted last week when our very own Suchetha Nambanoor-Kunnath successfully defended her PhD thesis, titled: “Language Models for Citation Classification”. Her PhD topic focused on large language models for citation classification and how this can impact several areas including research evaluation, literature discovery and summary generation.
Suchetha’s panel was chaired by Prof. Bart Rienties, while Professors Enrico Motto, from KMi, and Silvio Peroni, from the University of Bologna, were her two examiners. Prof. Silvio Peroni commented that he was particularly impressed with the literature review, which was published as a stand-alone piece of work in the Journal of Qualitative Scientific Studies this past December.
Identifying and extracting authors’ Rights Retention Statements from full text academic articles
CORE has been working closely with our member institutions to co-create the design and functionality for a new module that can assist with the discovery and management of authors’ Rights Retention statements for published works.
The problem
A Rights Retention Statement is a declaration by an author that they retain certain copyright rights to their scholarly work, even when they sign a publication agreement with a journal publisher. This statement is often used to ensure that authors can comply with open access mandates from funding agencies, such as those under Plan S, which require that the research they fund be made freely available to the public. Under Plan S, the Rights Retention strategy is a significant aspect because it aims to ensure that authors retain copyright on their articles, even when they publish in subscription journals.
US Repository Network launches pilot with CORE to enhance discoverability of Open Access content in repositories.
An interoperable and well-functioning network of repositories is an essential component of US national research infrastructure and will play a crucial role in creating a more open and equitable global scholarly communications system. With the advent of the recent OSTP Memorandum requiring Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, there is a need to help repositories identify tools and practices to ensure that they can become an effective compliance option for this policy
UKCoRR Members’ Day – CORE Panel Session
The UKCoRR Members’ Day took place on November 13th and, at very short notice, was held online due to the ongoing technical problems currently being experienced by The British Library, who were the original hosts for the day long event.
Our panel session, entitled “CORE, repositories and supporting UKRI OA Policy” saw substantial participation with more than 120 people from U.K. HEIs in attendance. The session opened with a presentation from Professor Petr Knoth, Head of CORE. This presentation detailed CORE’s recent advancements and developments planned for the coming months, with the focus on how the tools and services being built by CORE can best serve the repository communities’ needs, with particular regard to the UKRI’s Open Access policy.
SoFAIR: The Open University to coordinate new international project to facilitate the reproducibility of research studies
We are pleased to announce that the Open University has just been awarded a new research grant in the international CHISTERA Open Research Data & Software Call which aims to enhance the discoverability and reusability of open research software.
Open research software and data are pivotal for scientific innovation and transparency, but are often not cited as first-class bibliographic records. Much of these software mentions therefore remain concealed within the text of research papers, hampering their discoverability, attribution, and reuse. This, in turn, makes it harder to reproduce research studies. The SoFAIR project (from Making Software FAIR) aims to address this critical issue by enhancing the management of the research software lifecycle and ensuring research software and data adheres to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. The project will build on the existing capabilities of the open scholarly infrastructures operated by the project partners. SoFAIR is a €499k international project coordinated by (1) The Open University in partnership with (2) INRIA, France; (3) Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic; (4) the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), Poland; and (5) The European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), United Kingdom. SoFAIR is funded under the 2022 CHIST-ERA Open and Reusable Research Data and Software (ORD) call.
CORE Team wins Best Paper award at TPDL2023
The CORE team were at The University of Zadar in Croatia last week for the 27th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) where they were presented with the Best Paper award for their submission entitled ‘CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering’
David and Petr accepting the award at the conference dinner
The paper’s authors; David Pride, Matteo Cancellieri and Petr Knoth are incredibly proud to have their work recognised in this way at this prestigious international conference.
Detecting duplicate records and manuscript versions in your repository
There are many reasons why a repository may end up with multiple copies of an article, for example, having the author’s original manuscript and the final post-review copy is a common scenario of near-duplicate content. Another example might be when multiple co-authors deposit the same manuscript without being aware of each other. Detecting (near-)duplicates and distinguishing them from different versions of the same article is both challenging and time-consuming. We have seen that a typical repository will have hundreds of duplicates and near-duplicate records, signifying the scale of this issue.
CORE + GROBID: Structured Text from 34 Million Scientific Documents (and counting)
We very recently surveyed our CORE members to ask what was most important to them and we received wide-ranging feedback. The CORE dashboard provides a range of tools for our data providers and their repository managers and users. Much of the feedback we received was regarding providing additional or enhanced tools for managing repository content via the dashboard. For example, metadata validation and enrichment tools were regarded as highly important.
Interestingly however, what was most important was making repository content machine-readable. This is closely linked to identifying funding information and rights-retention strategies. Ensuring content is machine-readable allows for the extraction of far richer information from full-text documents than that available in the metadata alone. In the U.S., the recent OSPT memo on ‘Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research‘ includes machine-readability as a required component of the archiving and deposition of federally funded research.
Asking CORE members what matters to them…
We recently held the inaugural meeting of the CORE Board of Supporters where we were joined by 32 representatives from the organisations that have committed to supporting the ongoing sustainability of CORE by joining our membership program.
These amazing institutions are critical to the survival of CORE and we’re incredibly grateful for the support they provide us.
Current CORE members
We work with our members as part of our commitment to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), by listening to our members we can understand precisely what is most important to them. Prior to this kickoff meeting, we therefore sent a wide-ranging survey to gauge what really matters to our members’ repositories, their users and the staff that manage them.