CORE helps Lean Library to provide its users with freely accessible copies of research papers

Lean Library – a browser extension that brings library services directly into a patron’s browser – enriches its services with CORE’s help and brings to its users even more open access articles.

Lean Library Illustration

The Lean Library browser extension delivers library services into library users’ workflows, wherever they are, with one aspect of this being the direction of users to open access materials whenever they hit a paywall. By utilising the CORE Discovery API, Lean Library is able to extend its pool of open access materials, helping libraries meet the needs of their users.

“With the integration of the CORE service into Lean Library, we’re expanding the coverage of open access articles significantly. We’re enthusiastic about working with the CORE team, and even more about continuing to simplify library services for all Lean Library users.”

Johan Tilstra, Founder of Lean Library.

Both CORE and Lean Library aim to provide seamless access to research materials for users. Due to this collaboration with Lean Library, the CORE Discovery service will now be indirectly used by library systems integrating Lean Library, thereby reaching more users.

Petr Knoth, Head of CORE and Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at the Open University, comments:

“Integrating with Lean Library is another example of CORE following the strategy of delivering services where users already are, rather than just asking users to come.”

This partnership shows the continued commitment to supporting library users in their research journeys. Accessing open access content has been and will continue to be an important topic for researchers and librarians. Adding CORE to Lean Library strengthens the latter’s ability to offer streamlined open access content for researchers, saving them time and money. Big picture, it showcases how collaboration in the field can create a larger impact within the community.

Lean Library’s developers commented that this was not challenging work:

“The integration was really straightforward: we had a meeting first to clarify one technical detail (if we can integrate from the extension, or if we needed to do it from our server side) then went to development and testing, which was really quite quick and easy”.

Both teams see this as the start of a strong collaboration, aligned with a shared vision of providing the best services possible. Moving forward, CORE will look for other opportunities to continue enhancing the users’ research experience.

CORE Team

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