UK's open access full-text search engine to aid research
Open access research is now more accessible as Jisc has developed a new search engine to help academics, students and the general public navigate papers held in the UK’s open access repositories.
Jisc has funded the Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) to create an innovative new search facility which searches not just the abstract but the full text of the article.
When researchers use current systems like Google Scholar to search academic papers they can find themselves denied access to the full article, particularly when subscription fees are required. They also typically have to search across a number of open access repositories or use searches that harvest data from different sources.
But now, using the COnnecting REpositories tool or CORE, people can search the full text of items held in 142 approved Open Access repositories.
“UK repositories contain a wealth of high quality research papers. This service should help make it easier for researchers to discover and explore this content. CORE is an exciting demonstration of how Jisc’s investment in emerging semantic technologies is being harnessed to benefit researchers.”
Once they’ve found what they’re looking for, the CORE system stores these downloads, so that people can still get access to the papers they have found useful even if the original repository is offline.
Andrew McGregor, Jisc programme manager, said: “UK repositories contain a wealth of high quality research papers. This service should help make it easier for researchers to discover and explore this content. CORE is an exciting demonstration of how Jisc’s investment in emerging semantic technologies is being harnessed to benefit researchers.”
CORE is accessible via an online portal, via users’ mobile devices or through repositories and libraries that have integrated CORE with their own search features.
Senior Research Fellow at the Open University, Zdenek Zdrahal, who led the project, said: “The Open University is at the forefront of producing new and innovative advancements in educational resources. CORE is an exciting addition to this history and we believe it will be beneficial to the academic research community and to the OU. There are plans to develop systems further, to aid research.”
CORE is already integrated into The Open University’s research repository, Open Research Online (ORO) which includes more than 18,900 research publications.
Search CORE with your research question.