CORE (Connecting Repositories) is a service provided by the based at
The Open University,
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...
. The goal of the project is to aggregate all
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
content distributed across different systems, such as
repositories and
open access journals, enrich this content using
text mining and
data mining, and provide free access to it through a set of services. The CORE project also aims to promote open access to scholarly outputs. CORE works closely with
digital libraries and
institutional repositories
An institutional repository is an archive for collecting, preserving, and disseminating digital copies of the intellectual output of an institution, particularly a research institution. Academics also utilize their IRs for archiving published work ...
.
Service description
There are existing commercial academic search systems, such as
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes ...
, which provide search and access level services, but do not support programmable machine access to the content. This is seen with the use of an
API or data dumps, and limits the further reuse of the open access content (e.g.,
text and data mining). There are three access levels to content:
* access at the granularity of papers
* analytical access and granularity of collections
* programmable machine access to data
The programmable machine access is the main feature that distinguishes CORE from Google Scholar and
Microsoft Academic Search.
History
The first version of CORE was created in 2011 by
Petr Knoth with the aim to make it easier to access and
text mine very large amounts of research publications. The value of the aggregation was first demonstrated by developing a
content recommendation system for research papers, following the ideas of literature-based discovery introduced by
Don R. Swanson. Since its start, CORE has received financial support from a range of funders including
Jisc
Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education institutions and research as well as not-for-profits and the public sector.
History
T ...
and the
European Commission
The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body ...
. CORE aggregates from across the world; in 2017, it was calculated that it reached documents from 102 countries in 52 languages. It has the status of the UK's national aggregator of
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
content, aggregating
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
and full-text outputs from both UK publishers' databases as well as institutional and subject repositories.
CORE operates as a one step search tool for UK's
open access
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
research outputs, facilitating
discoverability, use and reuse. The importance of the service has been widely recognised by
Jisc
Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit company that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education institutions and research as well as not-for-profits and the public sector.
History
T ...
, which suggested that CORE should preserve the required resources to sustain its operation and explore an international sustainability model.
CORE is now one of the Repository Shared Services projects, along with
Sherpa Services, IRUS-UK, Jisc Publications Router and
OpenDOAR.
In 2018, CORE said it was the world's largest aggregator of open access research papers. Based on the open access fundamental principles, as they were described in the
Budapest Open Access Initiative
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) is a public statement of principles relating to open access to the research literature, which was released to the public on February 14, 2002. It arose from a conference convened in Budapest by the Open S ...
, its open access content not only must be openly available to download and read, but it must also allow its reuse, both by humans and machines. As a result, there was a need to exploit the content reuse, which could be made possible with the implementation of a technical infrastructure. The CORE project started with the goal of connecting
metadata
Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...
and full-text outputs offering, through content aggregation, value-added services, and by opening new opportunities in the research process.
CORE later changed the license of its datasets to "all rights reserved" and was overtaken by
Internet Archive Scholar
The Internet Archive Scholar is a scholarly search engine
A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web se ...
, which in 2022 had over 25 million full-text articles vs. less than 10 million on CORE.
Programmable access to CORE data
CORE data can be accessed through an
API or downloaded as a pre-processed and semantically enriched data dump.
Searching CORE
CORE provides searchable access to a collection of over 125 million open access harvested research outputs. All outputs can be accessed and downloaded free of cost and have limited re-use restrictions. One can search the CORE content using a
faceted search
Faceted search is a technique that involves augmenting traditional search techniques with a faceted navigation system, allowing users to narrow down search results by applying multiple filters based on faceted classification of the items. It is so ...
. CORE also provides a cross-repository content recommendation system based on full-texts. The collection of the harvested outputs is available either by looking at the latest additions or by browsing the collection at the date of harvesting.
The CORE search engine was selected by an author on Jisc in 2013 as one of the top 10 search engines for open access research, facilitating access to academic papers.
Analytical use of CORE data
The availability of data aggregated and enriched by CORE provides opportunities for the development of new analytical services for research literature. These can be used, for example, to monitor growth and trends in research, validate compliance with
open access mandate
An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their publishe ...
s and to develop new automatic metrics for evaluating research excellence.
According to the
Registry of Open Access Repositories, the number of funders increased from 22 units in 2007 to 34 in 2010 and then to 67 in 2015, while the number of institutional full-text and open access mandates picked up from 137 units in 2007 to 430 in 2015.
Applications
CORE offers eight applications:
*CORE API, provides an access point to develop applications making use of CORE's collection of Open Access content.
*CORE Dataset, provides access to the data aggregated from repositories by CORE and allows their further manipulation.
*CORE Recommender, can link an institutional repository with the CORE service and recommends semantically related resources.
*CORE Repository Dashboard, is a tool for repository managers or research output administrators. The aim of the Repository Dashboard is to provide control over the aggregated content and help in the management and validation of the repository collections and services. It is integrated in the Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (IRUS-UK), a Jisc-funded project that serves as a national repository usage statistics aggregation servire.
*CORE Analytics Dashboard, helps institutions to understand and monitor the impact of their research.
* CORE Search, enables users to search and access research papers.
* CORE Publisher Connector, provides access to Gold and
Hybrid Gold Open Access articles aggregated from non-standard systems of major publishers. Data is exposed via the ResourceSync protocol.
* CORE SDKs, provide access to content for programs. The CORE SDK R is freely available and it is mainly community led. The aim is to maximise the productivity and data analysis, prototyping and migration.
See also
*
List of academic databases and search engines
This article contains a representative list of notable databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, institutional repositories, archives, or other collections of scientific and ...
*
BASE (search engine)
*
Directory of Open Access Journals
*
Open Access Button
The Open Access Button is a browser bookmarklet which registers when people hit a paywall to an academic article and cannot access it. It is supported by Medsin UK and the Right to Research Coalition.
A prototype was built at a BMJ Hack Weeken ...
*
Paperity
References
External links
* {{official website
Academic publishing
Aggregation-based digital libraries
Applied data mining
Educational organisations based in the United Kingdom
Full-text scholarly online databases
Information technology organisations based in the United Kingdom
Jisc
British digital libraries
Open-access archives
Open University
Organisations based in Milton Keynes
Scholarly search services
Science and technology in Buckinghamshire