Authors: Petr Knoth and David Pride
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 into three main categories; Governance, Sustainability and Insurance:
Governance:
💚 Coverage across the research enterprise
💛 Stakeholder Governed
💚 Non-discriminatory membership
💚 Transparent operations
💚 Cannot lobby
💛 Living will
Sustainability:
💚 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
💚 Goal to generate surplus
💛 Goal to create a contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
💚 Mission-consistent revenue generation
💚 Revenue based on services, not data
Insurance:
💛 Open source
💚 Open data
💚 Available data
💚 Patent non-assertion
Governance
💚 Coverage across the research enterprise
CORE is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission. We serve the global network of repositories and journals by increasing the discoverability and reuse of open access content across all research disciplines. Our services support a wide range of stakeholders, specifically researchers, the general public, academic institutions, developers, funders and companies.
CORE’s mission is central to the success of the OA movement. CORE was established in direct response to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI, 2001) declaration, which recommends the green self-archiving route to OA. The declaration states that: “When these archives conform to standards created by the Open Archives Initiative, then search engines and other tools can treat the separate archives as one. Users then need not know which archives exist or where they are located in order to find and make use of their contents.” CORE, as an aggregator implementing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), directly fulfils this role by enabling users to see, communicate and reuse all open access content via a unified interface. We are an enabling open access and open science infrastructure. Our mission is to aggregate all open access research worldwide and deliver seamless access to it for all. In this way, CORE provides a singular end-point for access to a huge collection of millions of OA articles (https://core.ac.uk/data).
CORE is an enabling infrastructure service supporting a wide range of stakeholders including researchers, the general public, academic institutions, developers, funders, repositories, and publishers across a variety of use cases critical to the success of the OA movement.
💛 Stakeholder Governed
CORE is currently governed by the contracts with our partners and governance structures defined within them, the key one being the service agreement between the Open University and Jisc.
CORE is approaching a more diverse stakeholder governance in two forms. Firstly, CORE is making positive steps towards establishing an Advisory board who’s role will be to ensure that the direction and decisions taken are aligned with the overall needs of the community.
Additionally, CORE will be seeking and recruiting members for its soon to be established Board of Supporters. As a part of the planned membership programme roll out, supporting and sustaining membership organisations will be invited to join the board. These member organisations will be able to vote on future plans, defining how CORE develops its services to best serve the OA community.
💚 Non-discriminatory membership
We believe that access to knowledge is a right, not a privilege. We believe that everyone should have equal access to knowledge. We recognise that all stakeholder groups can offer different and valid insights and opinions and should be welcomed as a part of an inclusive program.
💛 Transparent operations
We are committed to open and transparent operations and see the establishment of the Advisory Board and Board of Supporters as key elements in ensuring the details of the operational aspects of CORE are both transparent and accessible. Further, this information will be publicly available, whilst remaining in accordance with current privacy and confidentiality legislation.
💚 Cannot lobby
CORE is an not-for-profit service delivered by The Open University, an exempt charity in England and Wales, which means that, under the terms of the Charities Act 2011, it is not subject to regulation by the Charity Commission, but by its principal regulator, the Office for Students. CORE is not a lobbying organisation but we view the development of the Advisory board and Board of Supporters as a way of coordinating a powerful community voice, with real influence on the development of the OA landscape.
💛 Living will
Whilst a plan to ensure the future of the assets built by CORE is in place, we will work further to make this plan publicly available. In essence, the codebase for CORE is almost entirely open source and is available via the project’s GitHub repository (https://github.com/oacore). CORE releases full datasets of all current content on a biannual basis and these datasets are then archived by The Internet Archive (https://archive.org). All data aggregated by CORE are also archived within the repositories, so should we cease to exist, the community would be able to re-aggregate the collection again. We use open protocols (OAI-PMH) to harvest content from repositories. The CORE services can be recreated based on our codebase and these protocols. Further, we have documented our operation in research papers and have an FAQ / knowledge base on the website.
Sustainability
💚 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
Baseline income is delivered through a service contract with Jisc. This baseline income, combined with matched funding from The Open University, provides the resources for the day to day operation of CORE. Additional income is derived from two sources, research grant income and commercial licensing of CORE services. These additional revenue streams are separated from the operational costs and are specifically employed to develop new tools and services.
💚 Goal to generate surplus
CORE holds a unique position within The Open University in that it is classed as an internal business unit. This allows us to generate multiple income streams, whilst also simplifying and reducing the complexity of these processes. Our licensing of CORE services to commercial partners allows for the generation of an operational surplus.
💚 Goal to create a contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
We have worked with The Open University in the last 6 months to achieve this goal. The OU has committed to establishing a contingency fund to protect CORE in the future.
💚 Mission-consistent revenue generation.
We build value-added services on top of the open access content aggregated by CORE and keep these services free for over 99.99% of our users. We charge a licence fee for services delivered to commercial partners, thereby ensuring the CORE service remains freely available for researchers and the general public.
💚 Revenue based on services, not data
CORE’s mission from the start has been to provide a seamless layer to the world’s open access scientific knowledge through a set of value-added services. These services include repository management tools, content discovery tools, recommender systems and the recently updated CORE API. All of these tools are available for free to researchers and the general public. CORE also licences access to these tools and services for commercial partners which provides a sustainable income stream.
Insurance
💛 Open source
The majority of the codebase that provides functionality to CORE is open source and is available via our GitHub repository (https://github.com/oacore) The Content HARvesting (CHARS) application is not currently open source, however this process leverages the Open Access Initiative Protocol for Meta-data Harvesting (OAI-PMH) protocol and is therefore replicable by third parties. Additionally, the CHARS pipeline has been publicly documented in a series of peer reviewed papers. (https://core.ac.uk/about/research-outputs)
💚 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
CORE provides at a minimum bi-annual data dumps of the processed and aggregated data under the ODC-BY https://core.ac.uk/documentation/dataset.
💚 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
CORE ensures that the datasets we collate are available for download at least bi-annually. This ensures the entirety of the world’s open access scientific knowledge is readily available from a single endpoint. We also provide API access to the latest dataset.
💚 Patent non-assertion
CORE does not consider patents to be appropriate in the scholarly communications domain and will not seek to patent any of the operational systems. The protocols and methods used by CORE are all documented in open access research papers. All generated knowledge is therefore in the public domain, making this non-patentable. Further, we are in the process of making a formal non-assertion covenant.