Every research article, thesis, and working paper, accessible to anyone, anywhere. That’s the reality CORE has been building for 15 years, making knowledge discoverable and usable for students, educators, researchers, and curious minds across the globe.
“It’s extraordinary to witness how CORE (COnnecting REpositories) has become a resource that can be embedded into new innovative applications that can benefit from access to reliable research information,” says Petr Knoth, Head of CORE.
Fifteen years ago, CORE (COnnecting REpositories) began as a PhD project with a simple but ambitious idea: to make open research more accessible, not just for humans, but for machines too. At a time when few could imagine tools like ChatGPT answering questions based on vast collections of scientific literature, it was already clear that the future of knowledge would depend on infrastructure capable of delivering information in ways both people and machines could understand. What followed was a decade and a half of learning, building, listening and working with the global research community to shape a more open, intelligent, and discoverable world of knowledge.
CORE will be contributing seven accepted submissions to the 20th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2025), taking place in Chicago, Illinois, USA, from 15–18 June 2025. These presentations highlight ongoing efforts to enhance open access, improve research discoverability, and address key challenges in the open repositories community.
From managing machine access in the era of generative AI to improving research classification and repository interoperability, each submission provides valuable insights for repository managers, academic institutions, and the wider open access ecosystem.
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.
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.
Our society is facing significant challenges due to the widespread misinformation, in particular on social media, substantially influencing public opinion. As a result, we are seeing a lot of demand for innovative text processing methods to fact check and provide an automatic assessment of trustworthiness and credibility. Machine learning and natural language processing have started to be widely used to address this problem.
While scientific papers have been traditionally seen as a source of mostly trustworthy information, their use within automated tools in the fight against misinformation, such as related to vaccine effectiveness or climate changes, has been rather limited.
The forest chatter has been clamorous since Microsoft’s announcement to retire Microsoft Academic (MAG) at the end of 2021. Like many others, at CORE, we have used MAG for a number of tasks including data quality enhancement and enrichment, to obtain citation data, for our research in semantic typing of citations and to enrich MAG and Microsoft Academic Search by supplying direct links to full-text content (in a similar way we do for PubMed).
Continue reading this blog post on the Jisc Research Blog.
It all started in 2010 when the then PhD student at the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University, Dr. Petr Knoth wanted to collect a large corpus of academic papers to explore related research content. It was a frustrating job as he realised that there not only wasn’t a readily available corpus of all research papers, but that collecting this information for machine processing was particularly difficult. While reading about Open Access, he came up with the idea to create a tool that harvests both metadata and full text from all research repositories on a global scale enabling unrestricted access to all content.
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.
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.