CORE (Connecting Repositories) is a service provided by the based at

The Open University The Open University (OU) is a British public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study o ...

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 European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

. The goal of the project is to aggregate all open access content distributed across different systems, such as repositories and

open access journal 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 ...

s, enrich this content using

text mining Text mining, also referred to as ''text data mining'', similar to text analytics, is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extract ...

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 A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital m ...

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 An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how ...

or data dumps, and limits the further reuse of the open access content (e.g.,

text and data mining Text may refer to: Written word * Text (literary theory), any object that can be read, including: **Religious text, a writing that a religious tradition considers to be sacred **Text, a verse or passage from scripture used in expository preachin ...

). 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 Microsoft Academic Search was a research project and academic search engine retired in 2012. It relaunched in 2016 as Academic. History Microsoft launched a search tool called Windows Live Academic Search in 2006 to directly compete with Google ...

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 content, aggregating metadata 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 research outputs, facilitating

discoverability Discoverability is the degree to which something, especially a piece of content or information, can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system. Discoverability is a concern in library and information science, many aspects ...

, use and reuse. The importance of the service has been widely recognised by

, 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 OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories is a UK-based website that lists open access repositories (including academic ones). It is searchable by locale, content, and other measures. The service does not require complete repository detail ...

. 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 ...

, 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 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 created by the Internet Archive in 2020. It contained, as of September 2020, over 25 million research articles with full text access. The materials available come from three different form ...

, 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

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 som ...

. 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 Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) is a searchable international database indexing the creation, location and growth of open access institutional repositories and their contents. ROAR was created by EPrints at University of Southampto ...

, 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.

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