CORE

CORE is a community governed service, governed by an Advisory Board, Board of Supporters, The Open University Stakeholder Group, Research networks representatives, and CORE Leadership and management team.

The first version of CORE was created in 2010 by Petr Knoth as part of his PhD work with the aim to make it easier to access and text mine very large amounts of research publications. The value of the aggregation was first demonstrated by developing a content recommendation system for research papers. Since its start, CORE has received financial support from a range of funders including Jisc, the European Commission and for the provision of services to both public and private organisations.

CORE has been indexing research content from across the world; in 2017, it was calculated that it reached documents from 102 countries in 52 languages. While it has the status of the UK's national aggregator from repositories, it indexes metadata and full-text outputs from repositories and journals from across the world.

CORE operates as a one step search tool for UK's open access research outputs, facilitating discoverability, use and reuse. The importance of the service has been widely recognised by Jisc, which suggested that CORE should preserve the required resources to sustain its operation and explore an international sustainability model.

In 2018, CORE said it was the world's largest aggregator of open access research papers. Based on the open access fundamental principles, as they were described in the Budapest Open Access Initiative, its 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. The CORE project started with the goal of connecting metadata and full-text outputs offering, through content aggregation, value-added services, and by opening new opportunities in the research process.

In September 2022, Jisc informed the Open University that they will not be able to extend their funding towards CORE beyond July 2023. This triggered a rigorous response from UK HEIs, represented in particular by the United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR), who requested that Jisc “reconsider, and ideally reverse, its decision to suspend CORE’s funding” and stated that an event where CORE becomes financially unviable and is eventually retired “would be disastrous for the reputation of open research in the UK.”

In response to this situation, on 1st December 2022, CORE launched a voluntary paid Membership Programme for CORE data providers, many of whom are HEIs. By the end of March 2023, 20 HEIs joined this programme including some of the most prestigious, such as the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge. The CORE membership programme has been designed with the goal of providing sufficient income to fully compensate for the loss of Jisc funds; increasing the diversity of income sources and achieving long-term sustainability of CORE.

As of 2023, the annual budget of CORE is around £600k. The cost of CORE is growing due to increases in server infrastructure costs, the growth of OA content and the need to index it, the growth of CORE"s users (currently ~ 30 million per month), and increases in the cost of human resources. The cost of CORE is expected to reach about £1m per annum within the next 5 years.