In the world of science, it’s common to talk about big numbers. Citation counts, impact scores, and download figures often dominate the conversation, somewhat controversially. But numbers on their own rarely tell the full story unless they’re connected to purpose.
As of 4th August 2025, CORE (Connecting Repositories), has surged past the direct data provider mark, a milestone that underscores both our accelerated growth and truly global coverage. It’s tangible evidence of CORE’s constant growth and truly global coverage. Unlike some similar services, CORE’s figure reflects direct data providers, meaning that intermediaries such as DOAJ are counted once rather than tallying every individual journal, offering a clearer and more transparent measure of reach. At CORE, we actively curate, maintain, and support these data providers, ensuring they remain operational and fixing issues on a daily basis not only for our users, but for the benefit of the global repositories community. Unlike services that restrict themselves to content with registered (often paid-for) DOIs, we prioritise comprehensiveness and equal visibility of research outputs from all parts of the world. We share this number because it says something vital about the shape of open research and who is included in it. A perfect example is the groundbreaking paper “Attention Is All You Need”, which appears in CORE’s index via preprint repositories as a seminal work without a DOI, showcasing that critical research can be available outside of traditional commercial publishing channels.