CORE updates
Much of the 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 below.
New functionality
API v3 beta release
During the years of the APIv2, we have helped thousands of users to shape their queries to the CORE Database. Time is passing, and the moment has come for a new era of updated CORE API.
We are happy to announce that the new CORE API version 3 has now been released as a beta. We are inviting the community to try it and are asking for feedback. If you are interested, please check the documentation. For any questions and feedback, you can contact us.
In the new API, we revisited the way you see CORE data. Additional information is available in the presentation prepared by Matteo Cancellieri, CORE Lead Developer.
- We updated our data structures to offer a new class of entities we call Works. Works represent a canonical version of research output, clustering its different manifestations across data providers (as long as they can be associated with the same DOI).
- We better support large results set for your searches.
- We have a better way to get you started with improved documentation and tutorials.
- We have improved user management, helping us to support them while using the API.
CORE dataset update
A new version of the CORE Dataset has been deployed – it provides a harmonised and enriched data format to access content from across our data providers. The last version of the dataset included CORE data from 2020, including around 400 GB and 2.1TB extracted open access documents.
Collaboration
- CORE is participating in the PMC LInkOut programme, helping to increase the visibility and discoverability of research outputs by providing direct links to these full texts from within PMC. Via this synergy (you can read more on the Jisc Research blog post), PubMed facilitates access to scientific literature worldwide and helps the medical community around the world.
- Flowcite has teamed up with CORE. This partnership will provide Flowcite users with free and unlimited access to millions of open access research papers from the CORE database.
CORE Ambassadors
CORE Ambassadors is an active network of open access supporters who assist us with the worldwide promotion of CORE.
- Two webinars were held addressed to the CORE ambassadors: “Introduction to CORE and CORE content management services” and “Accessing raw data, discovering and accessing free content via CORE”. The slides are publicly available, with an open license on the CORE Ambassadors page, at the Outreach Materials (general and services presentations).
- We are pleased to warmly welcome our new CORE Ambassador from Oceania, Dr John Paull, University of Tasmania.
- On Wednesday, 17th February, CORE Ambassador Milica Seskuvic gave a webinar presentation on RePol, a Repository Policy Generator service. During her presentation, she mentioned CORE as a global harvester, discussing the usefulness of the RePol service to harvesters and the machine readability of the repository policies. CORE has offered feedback to the RePol project in the past.
Looking at the numbers
- On 5th March, CORE.ac.uk crossed a new milestone of two million visitors per day and has nearly reached the mark of being among the top 1,000 websites globally. The team is delighted to continue with the rapid growth of our visitor numbers. In general, CORE usage has continued to rise in this period to 42.7 million monthly active users.
- Alexa Rank statistics continue to grow as well. CORE is now ranked 1167, more than 200 positions higher than the last quartile. This rank is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and pageviews on a website over three months. This means CORE is now among 1,500 most visible websites on the Internet and among the top 20 in Science and Education, according to SimilarWeb.
Alexa Rank - The CORE Twitter followers increased by 26% and exceeded 1,946 followers, whereas CORE’s account was mentioned 31 times during that period. To find out the latest news, developments, and articles on open research, follow us on Twitter @oacore.
April fool’s day
Finally, the CORE community greatly enjoyed this year’s April fool’s day blog post, where we kicked off a new metric for scientific outputs.
If you want to stay up-to-date with what we’re doing, follow us on Twitter @oacore.
The CORE Team