COnnecting REpositories

CORE (COnnecting REpositories) is a service provided by the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), based at The Open University, United Kingdom. The goal of the project is to aggregate all open access content distributed across different systems, such as repositories and open access journals, enrich this content using text mining and data mining, and provide free access to it through a set of services. The CORE project also aims to promote open access to scholarly outputs. It fully supports the taxpayer's entitlement to the research they have funded and facilitates the wide dissemination of the open access content. CORE works closely with digital libraries and institutional repositories.

Based on the open access fundamental principles, as they were described in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), the open access content not only must be openly available to download and read, but it must also allow its reuse, both by humans and machines. As a result, there was a need to exploit the content reuse, which could be made possible with the implementation of a technical infrastructure. Thus the CORE project started with the goal of connecting metadata and full-text outputs offering, via the content aggregation, value-added services, and opening new opportunities in the research process.

Currently there are existing commercial academic search systems, such as Google Scholar, which provide search and access level services, but do not support programmable machine access to the content, for example with the use of an API or data dumps. This limits the further reuse of the open access content, for example, with regards to text and data mining. Taking into consideration that there are three access levels to content: 1. access at the granularity of papers, 2. analytical access and granularity of collections and 3. programmable machine access to data the programmable machine access is the main feature that distinguishes CORE from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.