FREE UKSG webinar: Towards sustainable scholarly infrastructures – The case of CORE

CORE (https://core.ac.uk) is, with about 30 million monthly active users, the world’s most used aggregator of open access research papers from repositories and journals. It is a not-for-profit service dedicated to the open access mission committed to the Principles of Open Science Infrastructure (POSI), serving the global network of repositories and journals. It provides services in the areas of discovery, machine access to content, content management and scholarly identifiers (https://core.ac.uk/services) for a wide range of audiences stakeholders, including researchers, the general public, academic institutions, developers, funders and companies from a diverse range of sectors including but not limited to innovators, AI technology companies and digital library solutions.

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.” The importance of this mission was further highlighted by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) statement on interoperability (2011), which envisages a “… seamless layer of content through connected repositories …”. CORE, as an aggregator implementing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), directly fulfils this role by establishing an infrastructure service enabling others (including machines) to discover, access and reuse open access content via a seamless harmonised interface. 

While CORE has served the community for over 10 years, the journey hasn’t been without financial and organisational challenges, with CORE’s income streams being several times under threat. In order to diversify income and increase resilience, CORE has been building a community support mechanism in the form of a voluntary CORE Membership programme, inspired by the sustainability streams of other open scholarly infrastructure services.

This webinar will present what CORE is, positioning it within the OA landscape and explain its functionalities and value for institutions and data providers. We will discuss sustainability and how CORE is committed to the Principles of Open Science Infrastructure. We will briefly mention the voluntary CORE Membership programme, which will be launching on the day of the seminar and allow institutions to participate in shaping the future of the service. The presentation will be followed by a short panel who will talk about sustainability of OS services.

 

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Transcript

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Slides

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