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 a technical, visual communication and usability levels. In January, we released a new homepage and redesigned the CORE services page.
Later that month, Petr Knoth, Head of CORE and Matteo Cancellieri, Lead Developer, gave a webinar presenting the new CORE APIv3 and releasing it as stable. The webinar introduced the new API features and included a demonstration on how to use it in a concrete use case. To find out more, you can read this blog post or watch the recording..
CORE continues to follow its lifelong mission of enabling others to build innovative applications and services in a wide range of areas using open access research outputs. Notably, in this period, we have partnered with Consensus to help in the fight against misinformation and with Iris.ai as part of a research project to generate scholarly knowedge graphs and to work on understanding the types of citations in relation to their context.
We have also started supporting two projects commissioned by Research England that use text and data mining methods to better understand the Research Excellence Framework (REF2021). We have provided these projects with custom generated datasets that enable them to conduct their work. One of these projects is looking into responsible and more automated methods of research assessment for the future REFs and the other is analysing trends in the research papers submitted to the REF2021 exercise.
We have also seen a number of Universities and research centres interested in the CORE repository dashboard and our Open Access Compliance tools. We are aiming to extend these tools to helps institutions comply with Open Access mandates, such as the UKRI OA policy. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you want to hear more about this ongoing work.
Working with our users and data providers to deliver a consistently improving user experience is a key component of our strategy. At the end of March, CORE has 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. The improvements include better query language, more powerful sorting and filtering, integration of deduplication capabilities based on the idea of Works (canonical entities merging the same paper from across repositories) and faster response times.
Finally, the CORE team submitted four papers to the Open Repositories conference and we have just learned that all of them have been accepted as full presentations. These papers are:
- “CORE APIv3: Seamless machine access to open access metadata and full texts from across the global repositories and publishers network”: This presents the new features and functionalities of CORE API v3.
- “OAI Identifiers: Decentralised PIDs for Research Outputs in Repositories”: In this work, we argue that there is a need for globally unique decentralised persistent identifiers (PIDs) for identifying research outputs resolvable to repositories. We propose OAI identifiers as a solution to this problem, explaining how OAI identifiers complement DOIs in the delivery of an open scholarly research graph. We will then present the first OAI resolver build on top of CORE. Watch this space for a full upcoming announcement!
- “Investigating institutional structures of reward and recognition in Open Science and RRI”: This will present two original research studies contributing to a better understanding of current reward structures, incentives and practices as they are applied in academia across geographical boundaries.
- “Qui Bono? – Cumulative advantage in Open Access publishing”: This study examines the differences in production and consumption of Open Access (OA) literature across institutional prestige variables and examines who is gaining the most benefit from the adoption of current Open Access publishing practices.
We will release the full texts of these papers soon, so watch this space.
Authors: Petr Knoth and Catherine Kuliavets