The OU has widened access to academic research material, making it much easier for academics, researchers and students to find and download academic papers.
Access has been vastly improved through the OU's Open Access search facility CORE, thanks to technical leaps in this innovative system created by the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi).
CORE - which stands for COnnecting REpositories - has seen unprecedented success in the past year and has more than tripled in size, now offering content from a global network of repositories, freely available to scholars worldwide.
CORE provides a large easy-to-search database to help academics, researchers and students to find, explore and download research papers. When the service was first launched in 2011 CORE could source material in 60 repositories –but today it aggregates data from over 230 internationally plus content from thousands of Open Access journals acquired through the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This means the service holds more than nine million metadata items and about half a million full text files.
'CORE is not only a search system, it is a free platform for developing applications that need access to the full-text of research articles. A very large amount of data is now available'
Funding from JISC is permitting the project to develop further analytical processes with DiggiCORE project, which will utilise social media tools.
Unlike other Open Access scholarly search systems, CORE also aggregates the full-text files, and not only metadata, and therefore ensures the publication full-texts are freely available for download. Users of commercial academic search systems, such as Google Scholar, can be denied access to the full article, particularly when subscription fees are required.
The reason for CORE’s success rise is clear, says software designer and founder Peter Knoth: “A huge amount of research papers have been available online as Open Access, but there was limited technical infrastructure that would support different kinds of users in exploiting it. CORE is not only a search system, it is a free platform for developing applications that need access to the full-text of research articles. A very large amount of data is now available through the CORE API. The CORE Linked Open Data repository has this month already grown to 100 million RDF triples making it by far the largest Linked Open Data repository at the Open University.
“CORE has created a resource which offers some intriguing possibilities. The API to the aggregation puts this valuable information into the hands of researchers and developers and offers them the chance to use it in new and better ways,” added Andy McGregor, the JISC manager of the Resource Discovery programme.
CORE is now available for flexible use online and on mobile devices and tablets and is already benefiting journals, scholars, at conferences and as technical support answering the demand for Open Access to academic research papers.
