The mission of the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group (BSDTAg) is to advance the state-of-the-art and develop new technologies powered by AI in the area of the machine processing of scientific information.
We identify with the use of AI for the public good. We carry out research to empower the next generation of researchers to be able to more effectively access, understand, interpret and build on open knowledge and to do so in line with the principles of open science.
More specifically, we:
We firmly believe that scientific knowledge should be available to all, not just a privileged few. Open Access and Open Science are key drivers for equal access to information for everyone. Through our CORE service, we deliver credible scientific information to tens of millions of people from more than 260 countries each month (SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities). Additionally, Open Science is a key component in helping to ensure everyone has equal access to robust scientific knowledge at every level, from high school students to post-doctoral researchers (SDG 4: Quality Education)
There is a current crisis on a global scale with mis-information having an impact in many areas from politics to climate change and beyond. A well informed society with access to reliable, trustworthy information is a cornerstone of a strong democracy (SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). Our group provides free access to the largest collection of Open Access, peer-reviewed, scientific literature thus helping to ensure that accurate, reliable information is available to all. We are also developing AI powered solutions for the public good, helping to empower people to form their opinions and take decisions based on sound scientific evidence, protecting against conspiracy and mis-information in a wide range of areas, including medical, clinical and bio-medical research (SDG 3: Good Health & Wellbeing).
Our research lies at the intersection of the following areas:
Our collaborators:
The BSDTAg has led and participated in a variety of national and EU-funded projects. Topics range from creating analytics applications and services to text mining scientific and scholarly data, digital libraries, open science and responsible research and innovation.
Last week saw CORE founder Professor Petr Knoth at UNESCO in Paris for the 2025 Software Heritage Symposium and summit. Professor Knoth was presenting the work undertaken in the first year of the SoFAIR project, a two-year multinational CHIST-ERA project. The Open University is working in conjunction with multiple partners including INRIA, Brno University of...
CORE, an Open Access infrastructure operated by The Open University, has been awarded significant funding for the next five years from Microsoft, as part of its’ support for increasing access to data and scientific research. Since 2020, Microsoft has worked to close the data divide and help organisations of all sizes realise the benefits of open data...
On March 22, 2024, the AI for the Research Ecosystem workshop (#AI4RE) took place in London, kindly hosted by UCL in the wonderful surroundings of Chandler House. The workshop was part of the Turing Institue’s AI UK Fringe series of events which took place around the U.K. The workshop focused on the intersection of the...
This summer the 19th annual Open Repositories Conference will take place from June 3rd to 6th at the Clarion Post Hotel in Gothenburg, Sweden. Over 300 submissions were received this year and the CORE team will be in attendance, presenting several areas of the work we have been undertaking over the last few months. We will...
The “AI for the Research Ecosystem” (AI4RE) workshop highlights the rapid evolution of AI and its significant impact on the entire research process. Technologies like deep learning and large language models are poised to transform various stages of research, including study design, literature reviews, code design, data collection and analysis, dissemination, peer review, and research...
Professor Petr Knoth, founder and team lead for CORE was recently invited to participate in a workshop entitled ‘Building an Open Science Monitoring Framework with open technologies’ hosted by UNESCO at their Paris headquarters. With many public and funder policies now mandating Open Access deposit of funded research, the need for tracking and measuring the...
An interoperable and well-functioning network of repositories is an essential component of US national research infrastructure and will play a crucial role in creating a more open and equitable global scholarly communications system. With the advent of the recent OSTP Memorandum requiring Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access to Federally Funded Research, there is a...
In November, there was a whole-day workshop held at the headquarters of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) in London on the topic of article-level persistent identifiers (PIDs) in the context of the UKRI OA Policy. There were representatives from HEIs, UKRI, and scholarly services providers, including Crossref and Cosector (host repositories). Professor Petr Knoth,...
We are pleased to announce that the Open University has just been awarded a new research grant in the international CHISTERA Open Research Data & Software Call which aims to enhance the discoverability and reusability of open research software. Open research software and data are pivotal for scientific innovation and transparency, but are often not...
The CORE team, represented by David Pride and Petr Knoth, were at The University of Zadar in Croatia last week for the 27th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) where they were presented with the Best Paper award for their submission entitled ‘CORE-GPT: Combining Open Access research and large language...
The CORE team are proud and excited to announce that our paper entitled ‘CORE: a Global aggregation Service for Open access Papers’, was accepted for publication and is now available as an open access article via Nature.com. This paper is the culmination of work by the whole CORE team, with contributions from team members both...
We’re keen to update you with the latest developments as we continue to welcome more CORE Members and keep improving the tools and support for our members while delivering on our mission to index all open access research worldwide. In March, we welcomed another six new institutions who have joined CORE as Supporting and Sustaining...
As part of our ongoing sustainability plan, in December 2022, we launched the CORE Membership program for data providers. CORE is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission and one of the signatories of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructures POSI. Following the recently announced changes to our status, to remain free for...
The annual OU Research Excellence Awards highlight the diverse research undertaken at the OU and recognise the impact that this research has for the economy, the environment, and society as a whole. More than 250 Open University (OU) staff, students, funders and partners came together in London on the 22nd September for this year’s awards....
CORE (core.ac.uk), a not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University in partnership with Jisc, has been serving the scholarly community since 2011 and in that time has experienced phenomenal growth in every way. CORE collates Open Access research from over 10,500 data providers across the world and is now the largest collection of open access...
This Vision Interview with Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at the Open University and Head of CORE (core.ac.uk), served as the opening segment of the NISO Hot Topic virtual conference, Text and Data Mining, held on May 25, 2022. Todd Carpenter spoke at length with Knoth about the many ways...
The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) offer a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives that support the research community can be operated and sustained. In this post, we demonstrate CORE’s commitment to adhere to these principles and show our current progress in achieving these aims. The principles are divided...
The first quarter of the new year was very productive for the CORE team with a number of new releases. First, we have been working hard on improving the user interface and experience of the website and its performance on technical, visual communication and usability levels. In January, we released a new homepage and redesigned the CORE services...
CORE has just released a major update to its search engine, including a sleek new user interface and upgraded search functionality driven by the new CORE API V3.0. CORE Search is the engine that researchers, librarians, scholars and others turn to for open access research papers from around the world and for staying up to date...
We are proud to announce that the work in our EU-funded project ON-MERRIT that aims to analyse and deliver a set of evidence-based recommendations for science policies, indicators, and incentives, which could address and mitigate cumulative (dis)advantages in Open Science has been mentioned in a Nature news article. The work of the Open University, which...
This post is our personal story of how members of the CORE team have been affected and caught up in the armed conflict in Ukraine. It is one of the many testaments to the implications of war and a plea to the Russian and Belarusian academic community to help stop this violence. Follow this link...
CORE and Iris.ai are extremely pleased to announce the initiation of a new research collaboration funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Discovering scientific insights about a specific topic is challenging, particularly in an area like chemistry which is one of the top-five most published fields with over 11 million publications and 307,000 patents. The team...
Our society is facing significant challenges due to the widespread misinformation, in particular on social media, substantially influencing public opinion. As a result, we are seeing a lot of demand for innovative text processing methods to fact check and provide an automatic assessment of trustworthiness and credibility. Machine learning and natural language processing have started...
We are always excited to announce new releases of tools that support Open Access and use the CORE services. This time there is a release from our friends at the Open Access Helper. This is a tool that helps everyone discover a legal Open Access version of research outputs around the web. What is new with this...
On Thursday 13th January 2022, Petr Knoth, Head of CORE and Matteo Cancellieri, Lead Developer, gave a webinar describing the new CORE APIv3 features. There were 72 attendees. In the first part, we introduced new features in the API, and the second part provided live coding examples followed by answering questions from the audience. Read...
We’re delighted to announce a new partnership between CORE and Cypris, a leading AI-driven, market intelligence platform that connects research & development (R&D) teams with innovation data and trends in their field. The partnership will provide Cypris with unlimited access to over 210 million open access articles to further enhance their platform and regularly add live...
The forest chatter has been clamorous since Microsoft’s announcement to retire Microsoft Academic (MAG) at the end of 2021. Like many others, at CORE, we have used MAG for a number of tasks including data quality enhancement and enrichment, to obtain citation data, for our research in semantic typing of citations and to enrich MAG and Microsoft...
We’re delighted to announce a new partnership between CORE and Arabic Digital Reform Institute (ADRI), providing services to researchers to store, share and access Arabic academia online. The partnership will provide ADRI with unlimited access to millions of open access articles to provide research platform and repository services to academics all over the world. The detailed...
Since the start (10 years ago!) CORE’s mission has been to aggregate and facilitate access to Open Access scientific research at an unprecedented scale to both humans and machines. To achieve this aim, we are always refining and improving our methods for access and use of the CORE data. A key consideration in making...
Much of CORE Team’s focus involves developing services that underpin open research. The updates for this half-year include numerous examples of this in action. You can find details about these and more news on the Jisc Research blog. Related Links: Read more.
The need for administering automated methods for evaluating research is gaining more attention lately. The primary motivation for this is to replace the regular, more exhausting exercises like peer-reviewing and the not so sophisticated, less accepted ways of ranking research works like Impact Factors, which solely depends on the citation-frequency. One such proposition is the...
It all started in 2010 when the then PhD student at the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University, Dr. Petr Knoth wanted to collect a large corpus of academic papers to explore related research content. It was a frustrating job as he realised that there not only wasn’t a readily available corpus of all...
Flowcite has teamed up with CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access research papers. The partnership will provide Flowcite users with free and unlimited access to millions of open access research papers from the CORE database. CORE is delighted to partner with Flowcite and progress our aligned goals to make open research content available...
October to December 2020 CORE broke records, partnered with arXiv.org and continued improving our REF2021 compliance monitoring service. The CORE team had a busy end to 2020! Our team concentrated on multiple areas, including collaboration with the open access community and new feature development. Find out more details on Jisc Research Blog.
CORE provides access to freely available full text papers which were previously unavailable in PubMed to enhance the experience of its users. This is delivered via the LinkOut service. Read the CORE blog post to find out more about this integration. Continue reading on the Open Research blog.
KMI’s CORE team continues to work on improving the CORE. This period was a highly productive period for CORE in terms of growing and developing our products. Find more in the blog post. Related Links: Find more in the blog post
The first edition of the shared task organised by the researchers at CORE, Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), The Open University, UK featured the classification of citations for research impact analysis. The new shared task, known as the 3C Citation Context Classification task, organised as part of the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP),...
The I4OA was launched this September, calling for an increase in the volume of open abstracts. After having identified that either a large number of the published literature does not have open abstracts, or that available abstracts are currently disseminated via proprietary platforms with reuse restrictions, I4OA calls the publishing community to open up all...
arXiv readers now have a faster way to find articles relevant to their interests. From an article abstract page, readers can simply activate the CORE Recommender to find additional open access research on similar topics. Read more at the arXiv.org blog. Related Links: Read more at the arXiv.org blog.
CORE’s mission is to increase the discoverability of open access research and promote as widely as possible the content of our data providers, i.e., repositories, journals, and web resources. We currently collaborate with more than 10,000 data providers from around the world and are continuously looking for new ways to increase this number to offer...
Despite the global situation caused by the pandemic and the ongoing changes, the second quarter of 2020 has seen significant progress in the operation and development of CORE – new products have been released and the team reached new achievements. Follow the link and be informed about: 1. 20 million monthly CORE users and growth of CORE’s...
Due to unprecedented events following the global pandemic situation, this year, the 8th International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications (WOSP), 2020 was fully organised virtually. The entire workshop constituted a single day, with four sessions, featuring keynote talks, with accepted paper presentations and a shared task on citation context classification. More details regarding the programme structure...
CORE is happy to announce the release of a new version of the CORE Repository Dashboard. The update will be of particular interest to UK repositories as we are releasing with it a new tool to support REF2021 open access compliance assessment. The tool was developed for repository managers and research administrators to improve the...
Thousands of data providers from almost 150 countries from all over the world are connected with researchers, students, life long learners and the general public via CORE. This past month CORE’s monthly users reached 20 million – we are really proud of it and grateful to all our content providers. Read more about this here....
Members of the CORE Team have been working on submissions for the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) and today we are extremely happy to inform our readers that our two teams have both received acceptance notices. Doctors Bikash Gyawali, Dr. Nancy Pontika and Dr. Petr Knoth have been working on “Open Access 2007-2017: Country...
CORE follows its mission and makes open access more visible and reusable by being an enabling infrastructure. This time CORE joins its forces with Lean Library, whose aim is to provide seamless access to research materials for users. Due to this collaboration with Lean Library, the CORE Discovery service will now be indirectly used by...
As part of the International Workshop on Mining Scientific Publications, WOSP 2020 (https://wosp.core.ac.uk/jcdl2020/index.html), researchers at CORE are organizing a new shared task: the ‘3C’ Citation Context Classification Task. The aim of this shared task is to classify the citation context in research publications based on their influence and purpose. There will be two subtasks...
At the end of March, CORE presented a webinar (slides and recording) on how UK HEIs can track compliance with the REF2021 open access policy. The webinar was fully booked and attended by 131 repository managers and research administrators from the UK Council of Research Repositories (UKCoRR) and the Association of Research Managers and Administrators...
Every day, millions of people access free OU content. Congratulations to all members, past and present, of our CORE and iTunes U teams for being recognised as two of the five Open Access sources mentioned on the OU’s Mission Page. CORE is the world’s largest collection of open access research papers delivered in partnership by...
CORE is extremely happy to keep its reader up to date and here is its quarterly report for January to March 2020 period. Read CORE Blog Post which includes: CORE is ready to release a premium version of the Repository Dashboard CORE’s products are used by Open Access Helper CORE is continuously expanding its ambassadors’ network CORE step...
CORE is a global aggregator of open access research content, one of the Jisc’s Open Access services and UK’s National Aggregator. Through its services, CORE delivers a number of key measurable benefits to its stakeholders, such as institutions, repositories, and researchers. Moreover, CORE’s value is not only proved by its services, but by helping others...
Last Tuesday, March 3, we were privileged at CORE to welcome a leading figure in the quest for Open Access to scientific knowledge. Carl Malamud and Petr Knoth had a very productive discussion of their work, common goals and shared their experience. What is more, Carl Malamud has given a talk at KMi on text...
Read about our work on going beyond mirroring content from our data providers to improve data quality. In our latest blog post, we present how we link CORE data to complementary scholarly sources and databases including Crossref, MAG, and ORCID. Related Links: Read more.
Claus Wolf, with CORE’s support, has developed the OA Helper – a brand new application, which enables iOS users to search for scientific articles in their devices without hitting a paywall. Fascinated by Open Access and Open Source, Claus Wolf implemented CORE Discovery and CORE Recommender into this application. Claus Wolf says: “Open Access provides a...
CORE supports Plans S in granting open access to scholarly outputs (such as publications) to anyone without any barriers and restrictions, including to most forms of use and re-use by humans and machines. PlanS is an initiative supported by the European Commission and various national public funding bodies (“cOAlitionS") who, from 2020, will require that...
At the 25th Anniversary KMi Festival we invited staff from across the OU campus to come and find out how our latest knowledge and media technologies are impacting education, science, and cities. The Festival attendees included Lady Kitty Chisholm, one of the three founders of KMi, the STEM Executive Dean, Nick Braithwaite, and the new...
CORE has just made it to the top 5,000 websites globally accroding to Alexa Global Rank, which is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website over a 3 month period. As of today, CORE ranks at 4,924, climbing 871 places over the last 90 days. The improvement is impressive considerring that...
Success in research and innovation should primarily build and depend on clarity of thought, innovation of ideas, and integrity of processes, rather than on external factors like prior reputation or levels of resources. Open Science and Responsible Research and Innovation aim to bring equity and inclusivity to research. Yet could policy interventions in these directions...
CORE participated at the Open Repositories conference (10 – 13 June 2019), which took place in Hamburg, Germany. This year’s conference theme was “All the user needs”, where CORE received much attention and participated actively with 5 presentations: Assessing compliance with the UK REF2021 Open Access Policy Comparing the performance of OAI-PMH with...
CORE a global aggregator of open access content and UK’s national aggregator will be assisting the UK Research and Innovation’s audit for the REF2021 by supplying the deposit date information for all UK REF outputs. Compliance with the REF2021 Open Access Policy is established when an author deposits the post-print or Author’s Accepted Manuscript in...
KMi researchers Dasha Herrmannova, Nancy Pontika and Petr Knoth win Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2019) for their paper titled: “Do Authors Deposit on Time? Tracking Open Access Policy Compliance”. JCDL 2019 is an A* conference (highest rank) and the world’s highest ranking venue for digital libraries...
CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access scientific content and Turnitin, a global leader in plagiarism detection software, have entered into a collaboration. Using CORE’s FastSync service, Turnitin’s proprietary web crawler will search through CORE’s vast global database of open access content and metadata—135 million metadata records from over 3,700 data providers and counting—to...
A study by Drahomira Herrmannova, Nancy Pontika, and Petr Knoth of KMI has been featured in Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The study evaluated the time it took for academics to deposit some 800,000 papers in repositories in relation to when these papers got published. The bibliometric data...
We are very excited to announce that CORE has released a new front-end marking the end of Phase 1 of front-end improvements, which will continue with 2 more phases. The key highlights of the new UI are: A more modern yet functional look and feel. Support for mobile devices. A new and better presentation of CORE’s mission...
CORE usage has increased dramatically in 2018 and has hit the 10 million monthly active users mark in January 2019 (10.41 million users). This is a 571% increase of users compared to January 2018. As of January 2019, CORE was the 5,448th most used website globally according to an independent Alexa Rank. This rank is...
CORE, the world’s largest aggregator of open access scientific content, and Naver, South Korea’s number one search solution, have entered into a collaboration that will see CORE’s content being made available to 42 millions Naver users. As part of the collaboration, Naver ingests data collected by CORE to enrich its Naver Academic search system with millions of open...
CORE has received a mention in a Nature article titled: “How AI technology can tame the scientific literature.” The article discusses how Artificial Intelligence (AI) assists researchers, and in general those who are in need of scientific information, with discovering new knowledge from the vast amounts of available scientific literature. It is estimated that...
The best paper award at the 22nd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2018) went to the paper authored by David Pride and Petr Knoth titled “Peer review and citation data in predicting university rankings, a large-scale analysis.” The paper conducted the largest analysis of REF2014 data so far (data of...
The CORE service is working in partnership with ProQuest to deliver more content within their library discovery services (Ex Libris Primo and Ex Libris Summon). What does this mean for the end user? This means that search results will bring back more relevant content from OA repositories worldwide in addition to the existing library collection records. The...
A new blog launched yesterday by Jisc focuses on their Open Metrics project which aims to support the development of new research metrics. Following the publication of The Metric Tide report in 2015 there is increasing awareness within the sector of a need for new research evaluation metrics that move beyond the limitations of traditional...
EIFL’s invitation to KMi’s CORE project to take part in a workshop for researchers from developing countries pays dividends for participants and for CORE. In June 2017, EIFL invited the global open access full text aggregator CORE to take part in an Open Science train-the-trainer course for universities and research institutions in EIFL partner countries....
Laworm, an aggregator of scientific online tools addressed mainly to scientists, has listed CORE as a top tool and resource, which helps science to become open and collaborative. Related Links: Tools and Resources to make Science Open and Collaborative
During 25 – 27 October OpenMinTeD participated in the FORCE2017 Research Communication and e-Scholarship conference that brings together a diverse group of people interested in changing the way in which scholarly and scientific information is communicated and shared. On Friday October 27th the OpenMinTeD partners held two workshops, one on “How to improve...
Since 2012, members of KMi’s CORE team, headed by Petr Knoth, have orchestrated the WOSP (Workshop On mining Scientific Publications) held each year as a part of JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Previously held in locations as diverse as London and Indianapolis, this year the 6th annual international WOSP workshop took place at the...
FIT4RRI is precisely intended to contribute to bridging the gap between RRI and Open Science and promoting viable strategies to render institutional changes in RFPOs (Research Funding and Performing Organizations) FIT4RRI moves from the assumption that there is a serious gap between the potential role RRI and OS (open science) could play in helping RFPOs...
An online editing and proofreading company, Scribendi, has recently put together a list of top 21 freely available online databases. It is a pleasure to see CORE listed as Number 1 resource in this list. CORE has been included in this list thanks to its large volume of open access and free of cost content,...
CORE, a harvesting service that aggregates open access content from open access journals and repositories from all over the world, currently provides 5 millions of open access full-text papers. “In the last year, we have managed to scale up our harvesting process. This enabled us to significantly increase the amount of open access content we...
The past month the French Association of Directors and Officers of University Libraries and Documentation (ADBU) released a report entitled “Text and Data Mining in Higher Education and Public Research”, which mainly explores the UK and French copyright exceptions for text and data mining (TDM). In more detail, the report lists the benefits of text...
Last week, the CORE team attended the 11th Annual Conference on Open Repositories, an international conference addressed mainly to subject and institutional repository managers, focusing on open access, open data and open science tools, projects and services. At the conference the team had six submissions: 1. A workshop presentation on “How can repositories support the...
In this year’s Open Repositories 2016 Conference, an international conference addressed to the scholarly communications community with a focus on repositories, open access, open data and open science, CORE had 6 items accepted; 1 Paper, 1 Repository Rave presentation, 1 Workshop, 1 Poster and 2 showcases in the Developer Track and Ideas Challenge. In our presentations we...
At this year’s Jisc DigiFest Dr. Petr Knoth was invited to sit on a panel discussing Responsible Research Metrics. This panel was organised in the context of the recently published Metrics Tide report commissioned by HEFCE, which looked into issues surrounding the use of quantitative research metrics in REF. The other two panelists were Prof. Stephen Curry...
The ebook "Text Analytics: 28 Experts Share How to Achieve Business Value" (download page) gives insights into how large industries are exploiting big unstructured data to drive business value. The free eBook was created to demonstrate the benefits of text analytics to a vast array of companies, customer intelligence professionals, and marketers. In this ebook Dr....
Following input into a report compiled by the Higher Education Commission, From Bricks to Clicks: The Potential of Data and Analytics in Higher Education Prof John Domingue spoke to the Guardian about how comprehensive use of learning analytics could transform the sector. John will also attend the launch event at the House of Lords at...
KMi’s project COnnecting REpositories (CORE) was included in the June issue of the Best of Business Web newsletter. According to the editor’s, Robert Berkman, comment, CORE … is a real gold mine of a research site. You can perform precision searches by using the advanced search to quickly search via phrase or Boolean; limit by author,...
The Open University’s Charter Day celebrations concluded with the Learn About Fair yesterday. People from all over the OU found out more about a variety KMi projects, including Engage and EDV. It was a particularly good opportunity for the latter to showcase the Democratic Replay tool, as we quickly approach the UK General Election next month....
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
