CORE update for April to June 2020

 

CORE’s Quarterly Update

Contents

1. 20 million monthly CORE users and growth of CORE’s worldwide rank
2. CORE Repository Dashboard and Repository Edition releases
3. CORE helps Lean Library to provide OA research papers
4. CORE Ambassadors’ network and achievements
5. CORE Discovery and repositories
6. CORE team research accomplishments
7. CORE negotiations and partnerships
8. CORE Statistics

Despite the global situation caused by the pandemic and the ongoing changes, the second quarter of 2020 has seen significant progress in the operation and development of CORE – new products have been released and the team reached new achievements. These are recorded below.

20 million monthly CORE users and high worldwide ranks

During the period April-June, the number of CORE (core.ac.uk) website users increased by  55% and reached over 20 million monthly active users. You can read more about it in our recent blog post. As of the end of June 2020, CORE was the 3,203rd top  website by user engagement globally, according to the independent Alexa Global Rank. This rank is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website over a 3 month period. This places CORE among the very top visited and used Open Access services worldwide. Another ranking tool, similarweb.com, places CORE among the top 38 science and education websites globally!

CORE site rank and progress chart on the Alexa Rank website

CORE Repository Dashboard and Repository Edition releases

A large proportion of  CORE development resources were directed to the release of a new version of the CORE Repository Dashboard. Access to the standard CORE Dashboard is freely available to every CORE data provider. The CORE Repository Dashboard received a brand-new design, user-friendly interface and a number of new features, developed for repository managers and research administrators, to help them improve the harvesting of their repository outputs and ensure their content is visible to the world. The update will be of particular interest to UK repositories, as we have released with it a new tool to support REF2021 open access compliance assessment.

Overview of the CORE Repository Dashboard

In parallel to updating the CORE Repository Dashboard, another CORE development team  launched the CORE Repository Edition. This service comes with full access to an improved version of the CORE Repository Dashboard and provides a powerful range of add-on tools for repositories that enhances the control of content for repository managers and improves the end-user experience. This service guarantees support for repositories, libraries and their content managers in the following three areas: discoverability, functionality and support. Read the full details here.

CORE helps Lean Library to provide OA research papers

We are very pleased to join forces with Lean Library, whose aim is to provide seamless access to research materials for users. Due to this collaboration with Lean Library, the CORE Discovery service is now indirectly used by library systems integrating Lean Library, thereby reaching more users. Read more information about this integration.

Lean Library Illustration

CORE Ambassadors’ network and achievements

The CORE Ambassadors network never gets tired of welcoming new members. Since 14 April new members have joined the CORE Ambassadors network and have already established a collaboration with CORE. The CORE promotional text is now translated into 9 languages, with the new translations being in Bangla. Find out more about our ambassadors’ network and how to join it on CORE’s ambassadors website.

CORE Discovery and repositories

Aaron Tay from Singapore Management University, together with other librarians, have written a great article “Why openly available abstracts are important — overview of the current state of affairs” and did some nice research on how the CORE discovery works for repositories. More about it can be found here.

CORE team research accomplishments

We are most pleased to report that 2 research papers produced by the CORE Team were accepted.  Bikash Gyawali, Nancy Pontika and Petr Knoth had related papers accepted at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2020), the top conference globally on digital libraries. These are “Open Access 2007-2017: Country and University Level Perspective”  by  Bikash Gyawali, Nancy Pontika and Petr Knoth, and  “An Authoritative Approach to Citation Classification” by David Pride and Petr Knoth. Follow the link and find out more details.

CORE negotiations and partnerships

CORE continues to deliver uninterrupted services to our portfolio of commercial clients. We are working hard in collaboration  with institutions all over the world and as a result some new contracts have been agreed and some have been signed. One of our significant cooperations is the service contract with Turnitin which represents important value to CORE.

Additionally, we have received a number of early-bird enquiries for CORE Repository Edition from UK HEIs and we are inviting others to join them. More  technical development is underway to expand the range of repositories to which we can provide this service.

CORE Statistics

Here we present the CORE statistics for the period April-June 2020. As of June 2020:

Content: CORE provides access to 24,936,921 free to read full text research papers with currently 22,720,197 full texts hosted directly by CORE. It also provides 195,188,296 searchable research papers.

Data providers: CORE has added new data providers increasing the content providers to 10,135 in 145 countries.

The CORE Team

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