Advantages of joining CORE
CORE serves Open Access
CORE aggregates open access articles from data providers around the world. For the majority of data providers, we identify the oai base url of the repository from the Directory of Open Access Repositories, OpenDOAR. OpenDOAR is the primary registry of open access repositories and registration in OpenDOAR ensures that the harvested repositories host open access content.
CORE’s mission to “aggregate all open access research outputs from repositories and journals worldwide and make them available to the public” aligns with the aims of the Budapest Open Access Initiative to “accelerate research, enrich education … make the literature as useful as it can be.” Our process for aggregation of articles from repositories is fully compliant with the original BOAI definition of Open Access.
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
CORE facilitates access to scientific research outputs for all
CORE facilitates access to scientific research outputs both for readers and machines.
While even the wealthiest universities in the world cannot afford journal subscriptions, CORE is working towards serving both the haves and have-nots. By providing seamless access to millions of open access research papers to everyone for free via its Search engine, CORE saves users valuable time in searching for open access scientific literature.
CORE collects, processes, harmonises and enriches large quantities of metadata and full texts, providing a unique API offering real-time machine access to both metadata and full text. At the same time, CORE data can be downloaded as a bulk dataset, via the CORE Dataset, enabling their processing in one’s own computer or infrastructure.
CORE enriches global open access literature
Overall, the main role of aggregators is to fulfil and support scholarly use cases, which cannot be satisfied by individual repositories and contribute to the open access mission.
According to the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) report:
A single scientific repository is of limited value, real benefits come from the ability to exchange data within a network … interoperability allows us to exploit today's computational power so that we can aggregate, data mine, create new tools and services, and generate new knowledge from repository content.
The Next Generation Repositories Working Group of COAR also advocates for repositories to provide better support for full text harvesting and support use cases enabled by it, including those based on text and data mining of repositories’ content.
Additionally, SPARC’s position paper on the role of repositories specifically says:
For the repository to provide access to the broader research community, users outside the university must be able to find and retrieve information from the repository. Therefore, institutional repository systems must be able to support interoperability in order to provide access via multiple search engines and other discovery tools. An institution does not necessarily need to implement searching and indexing functionality to satisfy this demand: it could simply maintain and expose metadata, allowing other services to harvest and search the content. This simplicity lowers the barrier to repository operation for many institutions, as it only requires a file system to hold the content and the ability to create and share metadata with external systems.
Advantages for repositories and journals when harvested by CORE
CORE is a global aggregator of open access articles (metadata and full texts). When repositories and journals harvested by CORE they enjoy the following benefits:
CORE makes research papers more discoverable. CORE significantly increases the number of times repository content gets accessed round the globe. A study of 21 UK institutions carried out in 2019 showed that when a repository is harvested by CORE, the number of content downloads increases by 15% on average and up to 32% if the repository is well configured for harvesting.
CORE ensures an increased visibility of your content. Even though open access content may be hosted in repositories and journals platforms, it is not always easily discoverable. CORE can further disseminate the harvested content, increase the number of users who read it and download it, and consequently increase the output’s visibility and impact.
CORE integrates and makes your content discoverable across a variety of platforms including PMC LinkOut, Microsoft Academic Search and a range of library discovery services. By developing these collaborations, CORE facilitates the widest possible dissemination of open access content and increases the visibility of content from your repository
CORE also increases the visibility of open access content via its Recommender service, a plug-in for repositories, journal systems and web interfaces, provides suggestions on relevant articles to the one currently displayed. This means that content from your repository can be recommended to a user while browsing in another repository system. The CORE Recommender displays free to read articles only that can be accessed without a paywall and it is also available to thousands of users of the CORE Discovery browser extension.
CORE exchanges data with other services of international coverage, such as Microsoft Academic Graph and CrossRef to enrich the harvested data. As data from repositories often come without basic identifiers, e.g. DOIs and ORCIDs, CORE enhances the harvested metadata, creates links and consequently showcases the relationship between repository outputs and published literature. The CORE Repository Dashboard is a service that assists repository managers with the discovery and identification of this information and speeds up the record updating in the repository. Thus, CORE’s functionality complements repositories and creates a mutually beneficial ecosystem.
CORE contributes to plagiarism detection, ensuring that open access research outputs are not misused. This helps you to ensure that the work of the affiliated to your institution academics is less likely to be plagiarised.
CORE can technically validate and monitor your repository and help you to keep it well configured. Via the CORE Repository Dashboard service and through the harvesting process, CORE can detect technical issues relating to the configuration of your repository or journal that affect the machine accessibility and visibility of your content. CORE generates error messages relating to the configuration of your platform and provides fixing solutions and details, assisting repository managers and platform owners with the platform’s technical improvements.
CORE provides analytical information to funders, organisations and other stakeholders, allowing the national and international monitoring of content growth, predicting new trends in scientific disciplines, etc. Thanks to its vast corpus of open access content CORE is in position to assist funders with identification of funder open access policy compliant (or non-compliant) outputs at the level of individual articles. CORE has been listed in the REF2021 audit guidance as the service that will assist with the a) verification of the dates that outputs became publicly available and b) compare the datePublished and depositedDate.
CORE can provide harmonised programmable access to all available open access metadata and full text, which is needed to enable content reuse by new services, possibly utilising text mining and other forms of text and data analytics.