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 research literature. Over 30 million users each month access CORE, either via search or one of our services. We have also worked hard to develop services for our data providers and support them with tools to help better manage the content in their repositories, including improving discoverability, registering unique persistent identifiers, enriching content with data such as missing DOIs and helping monitor that their content remains compliant with Open Access policies and mandates.
CORE is a not-for-profit endeavour, committed to the the Principles of Open Science Infrastructure (POSI), and we have always strived to ensure that the service remains completely free for public use. This means funding the service is no small task. Today sees the start of a new effort to help not only sustain CORE, but to enable us to continue to grow and support our huge community of users.
We’re hugely excited to announce the pre-launch of the CORE Membership program, designed exclusively for organisations such as academic institutions and data providers.
The new CORE Membership programme offers your organisation a very public way of supporting a key component of the global Open Science scholarly infrastructure. Your membership confers several key benefits including:
- Public recognition of your support for key Open Science infrastructure through display of your organisation’s logo and banners within CORE Search and across the CORE ecosystem.
- Participation in our governance programme.
- Guaranteed technical support for your repository.
- Access to the CORE Repository Dashboard loaded with tools for Open Access compliance checking, metadata quality validation, enrichment and assessment of repository health.
- Inclusion of your OA articles within our global OAI identifiers resolution system (https://oai.core.ac.uk/), turning them into PIDs and making them more discoverable across the network of OA repositories.
- Unlimited access to our raw data services for your organisation, including the CORE API and CORE Dataset.
- Enhanced discoverability of your content across the OA network through our range of our discovery tools including CORE Recommender, CORE Discovery and your content promoted to PubMed Central (via the Link Out service).
Visit the CORE Membership page for more information on Member Benefits.
Members who commit to supporting CORE financially are offered a seat on the Board of Supporters and can help us shape the future direction of CORE.
Dr. Petr Knoth, Head of CORE, says: “With the CORE Membership programme, we are reaching out to the Open Science community to help support and sustain our operations, so that we can remain an independent force for good and to continue diligently serving the global network of open data providers.”
Nicola Dowson, Chair of United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR) and a Senior Library Manager for Research Support states: “It is important as a community that we support open research infrastructures such as CORE. Institutions who choose to become CORE Members will help sustain, improve and govern the services that CORE offers ensuring they serve the wide interests of the scholarly community.”
We also firmly believe in fairness, the membership fees of the CORE Membership program are structured in a way to ensure that those from smaller organisations and those from low and low-middle income countries are not disadvantaged.
The CORE team is passionate about our support for the Open Access community and we are excited to see the service continue to grow and thrive. To do this, we need your support. Please register your interest early and we’ll shortly be in touch with full details of how your organisation can benefit from the CORE Membership Program and help support us in our mission.
Thank you.
The CORE Team.