CORE Membership
Introduction

The need to create and develop sustainable open scholarly infrastructures
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)
20th Anniversary in 2022

By “open access” to peer-reviewed research literature, we mean its free availability on the
public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or linkto the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, oruse them for any other lawful purpose, without ﬁnancial, legal, or technical barriers otherthan those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

CORE’s role in the OA repositories network
Confederation of Open Access Repositories[COAR manifesto]“Each individual repository is of limited value for research: the real power of Open Access lies in thepossibility of connecting and tying together repositories, which is why we need interoperability. In
order to create a seamless layer of content through connected repositories from around the world,
Open Access relies on interoperability, the ability for systems to communicate with each other andpass information back and forth in a usable format. Interoperability allows us to exploit today’s
computational power so that we can aggregate, data mine, create new tools and services, andgenerate new knowledge from repository content.‘’

Why is an indexing system for repositories needed?
An indexing system for repositories is needed to:-facilitate efﬁcient search,-enhance discoverability,-

promote interoperability,-

support quality control of scholarly resources,-

support for research and education,-

increase knowledge exchange,-

support compliance and reporting.

Findability

Accessibility

Interoperability

Reusability

FAIRWhat is CORE

CORE’s mission isto index all open access researchworldwide and deliver unrestricted
access for all.
We are here to support and advancethe Open Access / Open Researchmovement.

WE AREWE AREa comprehensive
bibliographic databaseof the world’s scholarly
literature.

a not-for-proﬁt scholarly
infrastructure dedicatedto the open accessmission, adopters of
POSI principles.

WEWE

provide solutions forcontent management,
discovery and scalable
machine access toresearch.

serve the global networkof repositories andjournals by increasing
discoverability and reuseof open access content.

What problems does CORE solve?
●●●

Increase your contents’ discoverability
and prevent its misuse
Support and assess Open Accesscompliance and FAIRness
Make your papers uniquely identiﬁable
and resolvable with PIDs●

Contributing to interoperability within
the repositories network●

Make your content machine readable

We achieve this by promoting your content to over
30 million monthly active users of CORE. Your
content will be discoverable not just in CORE
Search, but also across the open access network,within the systems of hundreds of data providers
using the CORE Recommender (such as arxiv.org)
and CORE Discovery plugins.

What problems does CORE solve?
●●

Increase your contents’ discoverability
and prevent its misuse
Support and assess Open Accesscompliance and FAIRness●

Make your papers uniquely identiﬁable
and resolvable with PIDs●

Contributing to interoperability within
the repositories network

In the context of rapidly increasing open accesspolicies (such as REF, UKRI or Plan S) and bestpractices (such as FAIR), CORE can improve theunderstanding of your content’s status and help you
prepare analytical reports for researchadministrators and funders.
For example, CORE conducted the UK REF2021 open accessaudit, verifying when outputs became publicly available asopen access.

●

Make your content machine readable

What problems does CORE solve?
●

●

●

●

●

Increase your contents’ discoverability
and prevent its misuse
Support and assess Open Accesscompliance and FAIRness
Make your papers uniquely identiﬁable
and resolvable with PIDs
Contributing to interoperability within
the repositories network
Make your content machine readable

Identiﬁers of metadata records indexed by CORE
are automatically registered as globally uniquepersistent identiﬁers (PIDs). For this purpose, CORE
uses OAI identiﬁers that are viable PIDs forrepositories, publishers and archives.
They can be, as opposed to DOIs, minted in a distributed
fashion and cost-free, and are resolvable directly to thedata provider rather than, as is typical with DOIs, to the
publisher’s website.

What problems does CORE solve?
●●

Increase your contents’ discoverability
and prevent its misuse
Support and assess Open Accesscompliance and FAIRness●

Make your papers uniquely identiﬁable
and resolvable with PIDs●

Contributing to interoperability within
the repositories network●

Make your content machine readable

By being included in CORE, your infrastructure
contributes to the national and international
monitoring of open access content growth improve
metadata enrichments, e.g. recommendations,
DOIs, ORCID iDs, etc.

What problems does CORE solve?
●●

Increase your contents’ discoverability
and prevent its misuse

CORE provides access to open access content in a

Support and assess Open Accesscompliance and FAIRness

with the help of AI. This involves harmonising●

Make your papers uniquely identiﬁable
and resolvable with PIDs●

Contributing to interoperability within
the repositories network●Make your content machine readable

machine readable format doing all the heavy lifting

metadata, cleaning and creating a structured
representation of scholarly data.

CORE - An adopter of POSIThe Principlesof Open
Scholarly
Infrastructure

Governance
Sustainability
Insurance

CORE is a mission-driven
not-for-proﬁt endeavour
and a signatory of thePrinciples of Open
Scholarly Infrastructure.

CORE and The Principles
of Open Scholarly
Infrastructure
Sustainability● Time-limited funds are used only fortime-limited activities● Goal to generate surplus● Goal to create a contingency fund to support
operations for 12 months● Mission-consistent revenue generation● Revenue based on services, not data

Governance● Coverage across the research enterprise● Stakeholder Governed● Non-discriminatory membership● Transparent operations● Cannot lobby● Living will

Insurance● Open source● Open data
● Available data
● Patent non-assertion

Community governanceParticipation of members:
Advisory Board● Advises on strategic directions● Ensures mission alignment with the needs of the open researchcommunity
Board of Supporters● Helping to identify requirements and prioritise the development
roadmap● Represents the interests of the global open repositories and journals
network.
The Open University Stakeholder Group● Assumes overall ﬁnancial and legal responsibility for CORE’s
obligations.
● Provides institutional support and resources for CORE (e.g. HR,ﬁnancial, legal, infrastructure).
Research network representatives● Ensures relevance and provides guidance on effectively supporting
the open research community.
CORE Leadership & Management Team● Is responsible for the day to day operation of CORE.
● Takes operational decisions with guidance from the governancegroupsCORE Members
Supporting and Sustaining

CORE Membership●A network of data providers who are committed
to the ongoing success of the Open Accessmovement●

We provide tools and beneﬁts for our members●

All CORE data providers are eligible to become
CORE Starting Members free of charge●

Supporting and Sustaining Members:○

help shape our development roadmap○

support and sustain CORE

Three levels of CORE Membership
Data providers

Starting (Free)

SupportingSustaining

Organisations who want to get theircontent indexed in CORE and beneﬁt
from increased discoverability (insearch, Recommender, Discovery andPMC) and persistent identiﬁcation (viaOAI Resolver), while staying in controlof how their content is exposed using
the CORE Dashboard.

Organisations who want to be widely
recognised for their open research. Inaddition to all the STARTING beneﬁts,
this membership also comes withextra visibility for your organisation in
the OA network, additional technicalsupport, CORE API access for yourresearchers, and a seat on our Boardof Supporters.

Organisations who are truly open
research champions. In addition to all
the SUPPORTING beneﬁts, thismembership comes with additional
tools to help stay compliant with OA
policies and FAIR, unlimited technicalsupport, CORE Dataset access for yourresearchers for text and data mining,
and two seats on our Board ofSupporters

How our members beneﬁted from being part of this group

USE CASE

University of Chicago adopts CORE’s article deduplication tool
“We do not have a duplicate check built into our repository, so CORE’s duplicate check is immenselyhelpful. While other repositories might already have duplicate checks, I don’t know about their usage ofML to ﬁnd duplicates. Based on my experience, I would guess that it isn’t as accurate if it relies primarilyon exact matches. CORE’s duplicate check displays the “conﬁdence” it has that a record is duplicated inthe repository, which is also helpful when determining the ﬁnal decision on whether a duplicate
record…”Kirsten Vallee
Repository Services Manager at The University of Chicago

READ BLOG POST

How our members beneﬁted from being part of this group

USE CASE

How the Oxford University Research Archive (ORA) uses the CORE API“CORE harvests and aggregates information of research papers collected from institutional and subject
repositories, and open access and hybrid journals, and makes the content available via an API. The
CORE API offers a wealth of metadata and full text content from its many data providers. For ORA(Oxford University Research Archive), the use of the CORE API offers an opportunity to enhance
workﬂows and streamline the process of reviewing and curating articles for inclusion in therepository...”Jason Partridge
Open Access Service Manager at the Bodleian Libraries,
University of Oxford.

READ BLOG POST

How our members beneﬁted from being part of this group

USE CASE

How the CORE Metadata Validator supports integration of Rioxx v3 in DSpace“With the rollout of the Rioxx V3 metadata schema, repositories can beneﬁt from far richer metadata for
their articles. Since the release of the updated schema, The University of Cambridge has been working
to develop an implementation of a RIOXX v3 for DSpace-based repositories which will greatly simplify
the adoption of this metadata schema. The implementation process and veriﬁcation of the metadata
has been supported by the CORE Rioxx v3 validator available in the CORE Dashboard...”Dr Agustina Martinez-Garcia
Open Research Systems Manager at University of Cambridge
and the Open Research Systems

READ BLOG POST

By being a member, you contribute to help us
build a better, fairer, more equitable open
research ecosystem for everyone

How to become a member?

Subscribe on the website
https://core.ac.uk/membership

Send us an email toUK HEIs subscribe in Jisc LSM

membership@core.ac.uk

https://subscriptionsmanager.jisc.ac.uk/#

CORE Membership
Join the COnnecting REpositories community and build open
infrastructure for repositories together