CORE serves Open Access

CORE’s mission to index 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

The main role of CORE 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.