FAQs

To check whether your repository or journal is harvested by CORE, go to our data providers list.

CORE uses information from various registries, such as OpenDOAR and DOAJ, to include new repositories and journals into CORE. If your repository or journal is already registered with some authoritative registry, you don't need to do anything. If your repository or journal has not been registered yet use the form to add it.

CORE is an international service and harvests repositories from various locations around the world. This information is displayed in a map at our data providers page.

CORE is a harvesting service and is not similar to research networking sites, e.g. ResearchGate or Academia.edu, where authors can deposit papers, so please do not email us the full text of your papers. If you have deposited your articles in a repository let us know the name of the repository. There are chances that we harvest it already and if we don’t we could start harvesting it.

CORE harvests DOAJ as a single entry, which means that each journal title does not appear separately in CORE. If you wish to have a separate entry for your journal in CORE, do send us the journal's OAI base URL and we will create a new entry.

We founded CORE to provide free harvesting, and discovery for institutions. Initially, we were funded to provide these tools, but much of our funding ended in July 2023. As a result, we have created a membership model, with both free and paid membership. Our founding goal remains as before: we harvest any institutional repository. If you register as a starting member, you can see a freely available dashboard that shows useful information about your repository. We have added optional paid tools that assist in analytics and compliance.

By joining CORE you are supporting the open research community. Moreover, we believe that our paid membership provides tools that save your institution time and money. It enables you to check automatically what would otherwise have to be done by hand, for example finding copies of papers by a member of your institution that were deposited in another repository (what we call the “cress-repository check”). Finally, as a paying member, we provide anyone from your institution with fast API access to the full CORE dataset for text and data-mining (TDM) purposes.

Our aim is to make membership available for the widest range of institutions. Accordingly, we have set three tiers of membership, using the widely accepted World Bank criteria for low- and middle-income countries. Our aim is to make membership available to all, because the more institutions who join, the better the service for all members: specifically, we can check other repositories for relevant content to your institution, wherever it appears.

Many institutions don’t have the staff or the knowledge to manage their repository effectively. For sustaining members, we provide a free repository health check every year. We go through all the results from our automatic checks and show you how to fix them. In other words, we provide a kind of out-sourced technical resource for you.

Both the Recommender and the Discovery tools are free of charge for any institution that provides their data for harvesting. They are both benefits of the free starting membership.

For many countries, including the United States, institutions may not track compliant across the institution. However, individual faculties and departments want to ensure that their publications are comipliant with federal and with funder mandates. Membership of CORE enables you to identify that a paper has been deposited, even if it was not deposited in your local repository.

For any institution, we provide a dashboard that enables them to see their repository from the outside - the way that any external service sees them. We give you statistics about the number of items harvested, how many of them are full text, and the proportion of content that has a DOI identifier. The dashboard is free to access for any institution who signs up for free starting membership.

You can only see the dashboard for your organisation if you have signed up as a member. Becoming a starting member is free of charge for any institution that provides content for CORE to harvest. Simply contact the administrator at XX@core.ac.uk to be sent an invitation to open an account.

Open access articles are free to access, but the publisher may not maintain a freely available copy for researchers to access. It makes sense for researchers to self-archive their content. The author (or the institution) posts the article in a repository, typically the institutional repository of the university where they work. However, in many countries, funding requirements are not only that the article should be available open access, but that the article should be available within a certain time period after acceptance. For the UK REF 2021, this time period, known as the deposit delay, was 90 days.

This introduces a reporting requirement for any institution that wants to be compliant with funder mandates: it is necessary to demonstrate that articles are compliant, that is, available open access and deposited within the correct time frame.

For every institutional repository where CORE harvests content, we try to assist you with compliance, identifying the date of deposit wherever possible, as well as the date of publication.

The date of deposit is increasingly added as a metadata field when content is uploaded to repositories. RIOXX, for example, is a metadata protocol that enables metadata to be shared across repositories, particularly date of deposit metadata. If all institutions make the date of deposit information available, CORE can provide a service for every repository by finding compliant versions of papers in other repositories.

Simply put, any CRIS system (Current Research Information System) works for an individual institution. Although it can often show compliance for papers within that institution, a CRIS system (or an individual repository) cannot find duplicate copies of articles that were deposited in another institution, for example if a paper has a co-author from Sheffield when the main author is based at Leeds. CORE is unique in harvesting repositories from around the world, and can identify duplicate copies of papers. As a result, CORE and CRIS systems are complements, not substitutes, for each other.

Use the registration form to retrieve your personal access key for the CORE API.

If you plan to use the CORE API we kindly ask the following:

• attribute CORE by including in your website this snippet,
• send us an email with a brief summary on how you are using the CORE API,
• grant us permission to present this summary to our funders and/or display it on our website,
• allow us to list your company’s name, url and logo on our website.

Yes, this is possible but there is usually a cost associated with it. Please email us the name of your company or organisation, business entity, the number of requests you estimate to send and how often you will send them and we will get back to your with a quote.

Yes, you can use the CORE API for commercial purposes, (Terms & Conditions) apply. We provide 30 Day Free Trial for Institution and Enterprise. We will ask you for your circumstances during the registration process and we might contact you afterwards to clarify any points and assess your eligibility for a free licence. If your circumstances change, please let us know.

Please note the dataset has been created from information that was publicly available on the Internet. Every effort has been made to ensure this dataset contains only open access content. We have included only content from repositories and journals that are listed in registries where the condition for inclusion is the provision of content under open access compatible license. However, as metadata are often inconsistent, licensed information is often not machine readable, and repositories from time to time leak information that is not open access, we cannot take any responsibility for the license of the content in the dataset. It is therefore up to the user of this dataset to ensure that the way in which they use the dataset does not breach copyright. The dataset is in no way intended for the purposes of reading the original publications, but for machine processing only.

We aim to generate a new public dataset at least once a year. If you need a more recent dataset, please get in touch with us as we might be able to arrange it.

If you have access to the CORE Repositories Dashboard, log into the CORE Repository Dashboard and you will get the instructions on how to download the CORE Recommender. Otherwise, visit our recommender registration page, where you will also find the installation instructions. Repository managers are highly recommended to use the CORE Repositories Dashboard.

The CORE recommender uses the popular content-based filtering system. The similar resources that appear in the CORE Recommender and their quality are highly impacted by the metadata information supplied by the repository of origin. If that information is incorrect or incomplete, you should contact the repository of origin. To improve the CORE recommendations, you can use the feedback button, with which you can remove any undesirable articles.

Unfortunately CORE does not provide any language specific datasets at the moment. Users can use the CORE API to download individual PDFs.

Non-commercial means:

• The organisation is a registered charity or a not-for-profit AND
• the use of the CORE service will not enable, contribute to or support the use of any paid-for service of the organisation or of another third party organisation linked to this organisation.

Download a high resolution logo of CORE.

You can find the most recent CORE brochure in our resources list.

Access the CORE’s flyer in our resources.

Visit our research page.

Due to cross university collaborations some outputs that could be considered non-compliant due to a late deposit may be compliant due to a deposit that was made within the policy timeframe at another institution or subject repository. Individual institutions could benefit as they might not be fully aware of all compliant outputs and might consider some of their outputs non-compliant, while in fact they are compliant.

CORE captures data as explained in the CORE recommendations. By following our recommendations CORE should have the same deposit dates as the repository.

CORE can identify deposits of the same articles from across repositories. By doing so, an output deposited late in repository A could be technically compliant provided that it was deposited within the timeframe at repository B, i.e. the earliest deposit date irrespective of the repository could be used. However, for the time being, CORE agreed to supply the data to Research England and it will be up the discretion of Research England to interpret the data. We understand that the motivation is to mark outputs as non-compliant only in cases where there is clear evidence that they are truly non-compliant.

CORE harvests both metadata and full texts, currently only in PDF format but we will include support for other formats in the future. While the presence of the full text is preferred, CORE has all information necessary to support the REF2021 audit as long as the metadata of your outputs are in CORE. To minimise the possibility of some of your outputs not being captured by CORE, please follow the CORE recommendations.

CORE captures data as explained in the CORE recommendations. By following our recommendations CORE should have the same deposit date as the repository. The date you see in the CORE API is the date the document was last seen in your repository and imported to CORE. The date exposed in the CORE Repositories Dashboard uses instead a new harvesting system that reads the “deposited date” exposed by your own repository system.

Deposit dates are available via the CORE Repositorу Edition. Repository managers can access the percentage of papers that are non-compliant, e.g. outputs that were deposited 90 days or more after publication, according to the REF 2021 Open Access Policy.

This is possible via a subscription to the CORE Repository Edition. Repository managers can access the percentage of papers that are non-compliant, e.g. outputs that were deposited 90 days or more after publication, according to the REF 2021 Open Access Policy.

CORE captures data as explained in the CORE recommendations.

The validation that the deposited full text is the first compliant version is currently not in the scope of CORE's support for the REF2021 Audit. Research England might use other alternative methods to check this.