We’re keen to update you with the latest developments as we continue to welcome more CORE Members and keep improving the tools and support for members while delivering on our mission to index all open access research worldwide. In March, we welcomed another six new institutions who have joined CORE as Supporting and Sustaining members; University of Exeter, Cardiff University, Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Hull, University of Nottingham and University of Strathclyde. A huge thank you goes out to all of these amazing folks!
CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and AI for credible, trustworthy question answering
Update 6th July 2023 – Our paper entitled “CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language models for credible, trustworthy question answering.” has been accepted to TPDL2023 and will be published in the LCNS series by Springer.
The public release of ChatGPT-3 in November last year captured the public’s imagination and turned this technology into front page news overnight. Only this week we saw the release of its much more powerful sibling, ChatGPT-4. In just a few short weeks there have already been some frankly startling demonstrations of the capabilities of these models, from writing poetry to code completion amongst many others.
CORE welcomes 10 new members
As part of our ongoing sustainability plan, in December 2022, we launched the CORE Membership program for data providers. CORE is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission and one of the signatories of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures POSI. Following the recently announced changes to our status, to remain free for public use, CORE is leveraging a membership model to help sustain its operations.
We are therefore delighted today to announce that, in the very short time since the membership programme has launched, we have already welcomed ten institutions who have made a public and financial commitment to supporting Open Access infrastructure by becoming Supporting or Sustaining members of CORE.
CORE to become an independent Open Access service from August 2023
Jisc and The Open University have had a long-standing relationship delivering CORE (core.ac.uk) for over 10 years. During this time, the service has grown from a project to an important and widely used Open Research infrastructure.
The current Jisc – OU contract for delivering CORE to the open scholarly community is expiring in July 2023. From this time onwards CORE will be operated by The Open University and will no longer receive direct funding from Jisc. The Open University is grateful to Jisc for its support of CORE over the last ten years.
CORE runner-up at Open University Research Excellence Awards 2022 
The annual OU Research Excellence Awards highlight the diverse research undertaken at the OU and recognise the impact that this research has for the economy, the environment, and society as a whole. More than 250 Open University (OU) staff, students, funders and partners came together in London on the 22nd September for this year’s awards.
We are extremely pleased that the CORE team was announced as runner-up in the highly-contested ‘Best External Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange Award’ for its knowledge exchange activities with a diverse range of external partners spanning from innovators, AI technology companies, digital library providers, plagiarism detection providers, academic social networks, funders and others, including its over decade long partnership with Jisc, the digital solutions provider for UK education and research. CORE received a small financial award to support research activities from the OU in recognition of this achievement.
CORE Membership – launching soon!
CORE (core.ac.uk), a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University in partnership with Jisc, has been serving the scholarly community since 2011 and in that time has experienced phenomenal growth in every way. CORE collates Open Access research from over 10,500 data providers across the world and is now the largest collection of open access research literature. Over 30 million users each month access CORE, either via search or one of our services. We have also worked hard to develop services for our data providers and support them with tools to help better manage the content in their repositories, including improving discoverability, registering unique persistent identifiers, enriching content with data such as missing DOIs and helping monitor that their content remains compliant with Open Access policies and mandates.
NISO vision interview with CORE’s Petr Knoth on the role of text mining in scholarly communication
This Vision Interview with Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at the Open University and Head of CORE (core.ac.uk), served as the opening segment of the NISO Hot Topic virtual conference, Text and Data Mining, held on May 25, 2022. Todd Carpenter spoke at length with Knoth about the many ways in which text and data mining impacts the present as well as the future. They discussed just how innovative this technology can be for the needs of researchers in the information community.
CORE: Our commitment to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure
The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) offer a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives that support the research community can be operated and sustained. In this post, we demonstrate CORE’s commitment to adhere to these principles and show our current progress in achieving these aims. The principles are divided into three main categories; Governance, Sustainability and Insurance:
Governance
💚 Coverage across the research enterprise
CORE update for January to March 2022
The first quarter of the new year was very productive for the CORE team with a number of new releases.
More about it can be found on the Jisc Research blog.
Major update of CORE search
CORE has just released a major update to its search engine, including a sleek new user interface and upgraded search functionality driven by the new CORE API V3.0.
CORE Search is the engine that researchers, librarians, scholars, and others turn to for open access research papers from around the world and for staying up to date on the latest scientific literature.
CORE constantly evaluates feedback from users and integrates this feedback as a part of the ongoing roadmap for CORE’s continued development. Working with our users and data providers to deliver a consistently improving user experience is a key component in CORE’s ongoing success.