Solving global challenges through open access

The Open Unviersity hosts the world's largest collection of open access full texts - CORE. This is a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University and Jisc, which is used and referenced globally by researchers, libraries, software developers, and funders. Free, quick, unimpeded access to research knowledge by researchers and the public is vital to helping solve global research challenges such as finding a vaccine for COVID-19.

CORE was founded and created by Dr Petr Knoth at The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute in 2011. Since then Dr Knoth has been leading the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group (BSDTAg) research group delivering the service.

Key impacts include:

Widening access to and discoverability of scientific knowledge and driving change towards open science.
Empowering commercial and academic partners to develop novel solutons leveraging scientific literature.
Ensuring compliance with research funders' open access policies.

What has this research done

Open access repositories provide free, immediate and permanent access to scholarly publications which previously were inaccessible or limited for use at subscription-paying institutions.

This has created a challenge to bring together full-text open access content from different repository systems in use and reusing it, freely and without having to pay a subscription fee.

In response to this challenge, CORE provides free and seamless access to millions of research outputs aggregated from thousands of Open Access providers such as institutional and subject repositories and open access and hybrid journal publishers.

CORE Data is used in the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021 Open Access Policy Audit to enable the REF 2021 audit committee to identifiy non-compliant research outputs.