services – CORE

CORE update for January to March 2020

The first quarter of 2020 was a highly productive period for CORE in terms of growing and developing our products. Details about these and more news can be found below.

CORE is ready to release a premium version of the Repository Dashboard

The CORE team has developed a premium edition of the CORE Repository Dashboard, with a particular focus being on the development of features that support compliance assessment with the REF 2021 Open Access Audit.

The new CORE Repository Dashboard contains a brand new REF compliance and DOI enrichment tabs. This service has been developed to support Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) with repositories. More specifically, repository managers, research administrators, etc. The interface offers valuable technical information and statistics. Users can benefit from the tool by accessing information that will help them to improve the harvesting of their repository outputs and increase the visibility of their content. The premium edition is currently available to a limited number of users and we plan to expand to all interested institutions in the future. The release of the new version will be announced through a CORE blog-post. read more...

CORE update for October to December 2019

During the last quarter of 2019 CORE released new updates for two of its services, CORE Reader and CORE Discovery, and has initiated new collaborations, for example with LA Referencia. In addition, CORE was singled out for its contributions and was awarded for its outstanding impact of research on society and prosperity. Details about these and more news can be found below.

CORE won an Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award

During the Research Excellence Awards 2019 Ceremony dedicated to the 50th anniversary of The Open University, CORE was presented with the award for “Outstanding Impact of Research on Society and Prosperity Award”. This important award reflects the clear value CORE represents to its millions of users as the largest repository of Open Access scientific knowledge. read more...

Releasing a new CORE Discovery browser extension

CORE Discovery helps users find freely accessible copies of research papers that might be behind a paywall on the publisher’s website. It is backed by our huge dataset of millions of full text open access papers as well as content from widely used external services beyond CORE. The tool not only provides state-of-the-art coverage of freely available content, it is the only discovery service which:

delivers state-of-the-art performance compared to other discovery tools in terms of both content coverage (finding a freely available copy when it is available) and precision (reliably delivering a free copy of the paper on success);
is run by researchers for researchers (as opposed to companies);
has the best grip on content from the global network of open repositories;
can deliver to readers other relevant freely available research papers even in situations where a freely available version is not available from anywhere on the web.

To satisfy the needs of CORE users, the world’s largest global aggregator of open access research papers now helps users access articles of their interest. Generally, discovery tools can find typically free copies of papers for about 15%-30% of published documents (slide 11). This means that in more than 70% of cases, they don’t bring to the user anything useful. CORE Discovery can offer the user relevant documents even in situations where other discovery tools are not successful. What distinguishes CORE Discovery from other discovery services on the market is that it does not stop when an open access version is not available, but always aims to offer related open access articles to the end user. read more...

CORE Ambassador: Nick Sheppard

Nick Sheppard Nick has worked in scholarly communications for over 10 years, currently as Open Research Advisor at the University of Leeds. Previously he was Research Services Advisor at Leeds Beckett University. Nick is interested in effective dissemination of research through sustainable models of open access, including underlying data, and potential synergies with open education and Open Educational Resources (OER), particularly underlying technology, software and interoperability of systems.

Q: What does Open Access means to you?
A: We live in the age of information where the world’s knowledge should be immediately and easily accessible to the majority of humanity. Instead much primary research is restricted to those that can afford it, whether to read under traditional subscription models or, under an APC based model, to publish at all. Meanwhile fake news is propagated freely with potentially disastrous consequences for our democracy, our ecology and global equality. Sustainable and affordable open access to research is essential for a well informed global population, the first step to building a better society.
With equity as the theme of this year’s Open Access week we will be exploring issues of equality including gender imbalance within the academy and how our University’s research can better benefit the Global South. Early plans include a gender analysis of Leeds research outputs and a Wikimedia editathon focussing on women scientists and encouraging researchers of all genders to properly cite Wikipedia with open access research. read more...

CORE Ambassador: Gloria Kadyamatimba

Gloria Gloria is a lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Studies, Institute of Lifelong Learning and Development Studies at Chinhoyi University of Technology in Zimbabwe. She has special responsibility for coordinating the Information Literacy Skills component of the Communication Skills module. She is a former Library Director at the same institution.

Q: What does Open Access mean to you?
A: Open access means unlimited access to research materials and tools to publicise research and make it more visible to a wider audience. Open access means knowing the research others are carrying out and making one’s research known to others.
In the past the Library was on the forefront of celebrating OA week. The celebrations entailed having seminars with speakers from the Library and other experts from around the country. read more...

CORE Ambassador: George Macgregor

George Macgregor George is an Institutional Repository Co-ordinator at the University of Strathclyde. His interests and expertise are in structured open data, especially within repositories and semantic web contexts, information retrieval, distributed digital repositories and human-computer interaction.

Q: What does Open Access mean to you?
A: Aside from the usual reasons why Open Access is important, I like to remember that Open Access is about resource discovery. It is about cracking open the sum total of human knowledge in a way that machines can understand and, by extension, providing it in a way which enables users to find scholarly content more easily and, of course, in an unrestricted way.
International Open Access Week is approaching soon but, to be honest, we don’t tend to have plans for Open Access week because at Strathclyde every week is Open Access week! I think there might be quite a few UK institutions that operate in a similar way. In the UK we are fortunate that there is a powerful regulatory aspect to the REF2021 Open Access Policy which ensures researchers take better notice of the open science agenda. read more...

CORE update for July to September 2019

CORE releases CORE Discovery in Mozilla and Opera browsers

CORE Discovery, a browser extension that offers one-click access to free copies of research papers whenever you might hit a paywall, is now published in Mozilla and Opera Stores. The plug in was originally released as a Google Chrome extension.

CORE presents its full texts growth and introduces eduTDM at Open Science Fair 2019

CORE was active at the Open Science Fair 2019, an international event for all topics related to Open Science. CORE had two posters at this event; a general to the CORE service poster, which updated the community about the full text growth and wide usage of the CORE services, and a second one about the eduTDM. read more...

CORE Ambassador: David Walters

David Walters, Brunel University David is the Open Access Officer at Brunel University London based within the Scholarly Communication & Rights Management team. He is an advocate of OA publishing, and of building services that realise the movement within local institutional communities. David has spoken at UKSG, NASIG, RLUK and Altmetric conferences about this topic in recent years. David is an ambassador for the CORE service.

Q: What does Open Access mean to you?
A: To us at Brunel, Open Access means many things – ideologically and practically. Most importantly, we consider Open Access to research output a critical, underpinning component on the journey toward an ‘Open Science’ world. Open Science encompasses many areas, aiming to enhance scientific and educational sectors.
As with many institutions, at Brunel we operate local OA services for our community, within an ever-growing landscape of technological and policy drivers. Open Access means creating an environment that supports policy drivers, whilst advantaging new technologies for our community as they emerge.
Much progress is being driven by these factors. However, it is as important to foster discussion and leadership amongst research communities. Open Access means researchers and students shaping and leading their subjects into new forms of science communication and practice.
At Brunel our role in supporting Open Access is to:
– Engage and inform our community about these issues as they evolve
– Build and tailor services to our community’s needs
– Recognise and celebrate ‘open’ activity by our researchers in all its forms read more...

CORE Ambassador: Milica Sevkusic

Milica Milica is a librarian at the Institute of Technical Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2007. Her education background is in art history and her previous work experience includes heritage policies and documentation standards, heritage-related civil society projects and digitisation, traditional librarianship and bibliography. Currently, her professional interests focus on Open Science, library services aimed at supporting research activities, training on academic services and tools, information literacy and research ethics. Since November 2014, she has been serving as the EIFL Open Access country coordinator in Serbia. In this capacity, she designed and coordinated the project – Revisiting open access journal policies and practices in Serbia, which was implemented with EIFL’s support in 2016–2017. She has also been involved with institutional repositories since 2013, when her affiliated institution implemented the first fully functional institutional repository in Serbia. She is now a member of the Repository Development Team at the University of Belgrade Computer Centre, which is currently the leading force in repository development in Serbia.
read more...