research – CORE

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. read more...

CORE runner-up at Open University Research Excellence Awards 2022

CORE was introduced at the very beginning of the OU Research Excellence Awards ceremony as one of the most used services the OU has ever created.

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.

CORE was announced as a runner-up in the category Best External Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange.

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. read more...

Using open access research in our battle against misinformation

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. read more...

How does CORE substitute Microsoft Academic Graph?

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. read more...

CORE, the world’s largest collection of open access research papers, turns ten

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. read more...

CORE wins an “Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity” Award

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.

CORE wins The Research Excellence Awards!

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.

CORE will be at the Open Repositories 2016

* Post updated on June 20th and June 23rd with links to presentations.

In this year’s Open Repositories 2016, an international conference addressed to the scholarly communications community with a focus on repositories, open access, open data and open science, CORE had 6 items accepted; 1 Paper, 1 Workshop, 1 Repository Rave presentation, 1 Poster and 2 showcases in the Developer Track and Ideas Challenge. The titles and summaries of our accepted proposals are:

Paper: Exploring Semantometrics: full text-based research evaluation for open repositories / Knoth, Petr; Herrmannova, Drahomira
Over the recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing new scientometric measures that could go beyond the traditional citation-based bibliometric measures. This interest is motivated on one side by the wider availability or even emergence of new information evidencing research performance, such as article downloads, views and twitter mentions, and on the other side by the continued frustrations and problems surrounding the application of citation-based metrics to evaluate research performance in practice. Semantometrics are a new class of research evaluation metrics which build on the premise that full text is needed to assess the value of a publication. This talk will present the results of an investigation into the properties of the semantometric contribution measure (Knoth & Herrmannova, 2014). We will provide a comparative evaluation of the contribution measure with traditional bibliometric measures based on citation counting. Our analysis also focuses on the potential application of semantometric measures in large databases of research papers.

Presentation slides

Workshop: Mining Repositories: How to assist the research and academic community in their text and data mining needs – a workshop / Pontika, Nancy; Knoth, Petr; van Dijke, Hege; Anastasiou, Lucas
Over the past five years there has been a significant interest in text and data mining (TDM) practices from the European Union (EU). In scholarly communication, TDM is already a developed practice in some scientific fields, for example, in the life sciences and computer science. Nonetheless, after a call that we sent out to the United Kingdom Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) list serve, we discovered that there was a limited number of TDM projects that had as their primary source of information the repositories’ collections. To address this challenge, the EU-funded project OpenMinTeD looks to enable the creation of an infrastructure that fosters and facilitates the use of TDM technologies in the scientific publications field, targeting both domain users and TDM experts. In this context we propose a three hour workshop, where we will introduce the topic of TDM to the repositories community, explore how the OpenMinTed project aims to assist with the adoption of TDM practices and present on existing TDM projects that were conducted using text and data from repositories.

Workshop blog post

Repository Rave presentation: Implementation of the RIOXX metadata guidelines in the UK’s repositories through a harvesting service / Cancellieri, Matteo; Pontika, Nancy
The COnnecting REpositories (CORE) project aims to aggregate content from open access repositories and journals and distribute this content in one central end point facilitating the open access dissemination of the scientific research. In an effort to improve the quality and transparency of the aggregation process of the open access content and create a two-way collaboration between the CORE project and the providers of this content, CORE has created the Repositories Dashboard. The RIOXX Metadata application profile aims to assist repository managers in tracking compliance with the Research Councils UK Policy on Open Access and Guidance. In this Repositories Rave session we will present how CORE is implementing the RIOXX metadata in the CORE Dashboard.

Presentation slides

Poster: Intergration of IRUS-UK statistics in the CORE Repositories Dashboard/ Pearce, Samuel; Pontika, Nancy
The COnnecting REpositories (CORE) project aims to aggregate content from open access repositories and journals, and distribute this content in one central point facilitating the open access dissemination of the scientific research. Institutional Repository Usage Statistics UK (IRUS-UK) is a Jisc-funded project that serves as a national repository usage statistics aggregation service, which aims to provide article download statistics from UK repositories. At CORE, we wanted to present the information regarding the manuscripts’ downloads to repository managers and therefore, we have integrated into the CORE Repositories Dashboard. In this poster we will present a) the submission process of the IRUS-UK statistics and b) how CORE retrieves these statistics and displays them to the UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

Poster link

Developer Track and Ideas Challenge:

Oxford vs Cambridge Contest: Collecting Open Research Evaluation Metrics for University Ranking read more...