The last 10 years have seen a massive increase in the amounts of Open Access publications available in journals and institutional repositories. The existence of large volumes of free state-of-the-art knowledge online has the potential to provide huge savings and benefits in many fields. However, in order to fully leverage this knowledge, it is necessary to develop systems that (a) make it easy for users to access, discover and explore this knowledge, (b) that lower the barriers to the development of systems and services building on top of this knowledge and (c) that enable to freely analyse how this knowledge is organised and used. In this paper, we argue why these requirements should be fulfilled and show that current systems do not satisfy them. We also present CORE, a large-scale Open Access aggregation system, outline its functionality and architecture and demonstrate how it addresses the above mentioned needs and how it can be applied to benefit the whole ecosystem including institutional repositories, researchers, general public and government.

1. CORE: Aggregating and Enriching
Content to Support Open Access
Petr Knoth
The Open University
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2. Outline
1. Aggregating Open Access (OA) publications – why, how, what
for?
2. The CORE system
3. Supporting research in mining databases of scientific
publications (DiggiCORE)
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3. Outline
1. Aggregating Open Access (OA) publications – why, how, what
for?
2. The CORE system
3. Supporting research in mining databases of scientific
publications (DiggiCORE)
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4. Growth of items in Open Access repositories
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5. Growth of Open Access repositories
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6. Growth of articles in OA journals
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7. Growth of OA journals
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8. Green Open Access - statistics
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9. Why we need aggregations?
“Each individual repository is of limited value for research: the real
power of Open Access lies in the possibility of connecting and tying
together repositories, which is why we need interoperability. In
order to create a seamless layer of content through connected
repositories from around the world, Open Access relies on
interoperability, the ability for systems to communicate with each
other and pass information back and forth in a usable format.
Interoperability allows us to exploit today's computational power so
that we can aggregate, data mine, create new tools and
services, and generate new knowledge from repository content.’’
[COAR manifesto]
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10. Access to information according to the level of abstraction
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Analytical
Semantic Enrichment
Repository
information access
Interfaces
Aggregation
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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11. Who should be supported by aggregations?
The following users groups (divided according to the level of
abstraction of information they need):
• Raw data access.
• Transaction information access.
• Analytical information access.
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12. Who should be supported by aggregations?
• The following users groups (divided according to the level of
abstraction of information they need):
• Raw data access. Developers, DLs, DL researchers, companies …
• Transaction information access. Researchers, students, life-long learners …
• Analytical information access. Funders, government, bussiness intelligence
…
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13. Layers of an aggregation system
Interfaces
OLTP OLAP
Enrichment
Metadata Content
Metadata Transfer Interoperability
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14. Layers of an aggregation system
APIs (REST, SOAP, XML-RPC), UIs, Dashboards Statistics
Interfaces
OLTP OLAP
Enrichment
Catalog records
Metadata Content
Metadata Transfer Interoperability
Annotations
OAI-PMH, OAI-ORE … Dublin Core, XML, RDF … PDF, Word …
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15. Access to information according to the level of abstraction
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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16. Related systems
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17. Aggregation projects – BASE
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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18. Aggregation projects – OAISter/WorldCAT
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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19. Aggregation projects – RepUK
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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20. Aggregations need access to content, not just metadata!
• Certain metadata types can be created only at the level of the
aggregation
• Certain metadata can be changing in time
• Ensuring content:
• accessibility
• availability
• validity
• quality
• …
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21. Aggregation projects – CiteSeerX
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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22. Should an aggregation system support all three user types?
Can be realised by more than one system
providing that
the dataset is the same!
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23. Outline
1. Aggregating Open Access (OA) publications – why, how, what
for?
2. The CORE system
3. Supporting research in mining databases of scientific
publications (DiggiCORE)
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24. CORE objectives
• CORE aims to provide a comprehensive technical infrastructure
for Open Access scholarly publications that will support access
and reuse of scholarly materials at different levels of abstraction.
• A nation-wide aggregation system that will improve the discovery
of publications stored in British Open Access Repositories (OARs).
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25. What does CORE provide at different aggregation levels?
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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26. CORE functionality
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27. CORE functionality
Step 1: Metadata and full-text harvesting
Content harvesting, processing
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28. What does CORE provide at different aggregation levels?
Semantic similarity, Citation
extraction, classsification, …
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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29. CORE functionality
Step 2: Semantic enrichment
Semantic enrichment
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30. What does CORE provide at different aggregation levels?
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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31. CORE functionality
Step 3: Providing a set of services on top of the aggregation
Providing services
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32. CORE applications
• CORE Portal
• CORE Mobile
• CORE Plugin
• CORE API
• Repository Analytics
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33. What does CORE provide at different aggregation levels?
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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34. CORE Applications
CORE Portal – Allows searching and navigating scientific publications
aggregated from Open Access repositories
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35. CORE Applications
CORE Mobile – Allows searching and
navigating scientific publications
aggregated from Open Access
repositories
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36. CORE Applications
CORE Plugin – A plugin to system that recommendations for related
items.
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37. What does CORE provide at different aggregation levels?
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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38. CORE Applications
CORE API – Enables external systems and services to interact with the
CORE repository.
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39. What does CORE provide at different aggregation levels?
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
Raw data access
Repository
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40. CORE Applications
Repository Analytics – is an analytical tool supporting providers of
open access content (in particular repository managers).
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41. What does CORE provide at different aggregation levels?
Repository Analytics
Metadata Transfer
Interoperability
Metadata
OLTP
Repository Analytical
information access
Interfaces
Enrichment
CORE Portal, CORE
Mobile, CORE Plugin
Transaction
Repository information access
Content
OLAP
CORE API
Raw data access
Repository
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42. CORE statistics
• Content
• 5.4M records
• 192 repositories
• 402k full-texts
• Started: February 2011
• Budget: 140k£
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43. Outline
1. Aggregating Open Access (OA) publications – why, how, what
for?
2. The CORE system
3. Supporting research in mining databases of scientific
publications ( )
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44. Partners
Advisory Board
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45. Objective
Software for exploration and analysis of very large and
fast-growing amounts of research publications stored
across Open Access Repositories (OAR).
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46. DiggiCORE networks
Three networks: (a) semantically related papers,
(b) citation network, (c) author citation network
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47. DiggiCORE objectives
Allow researchers to use this platform to analyse
publications.
Why?
• To identifying patterns in the behaviour of research
communities
• To detect trends in research disciplines
• To gain new insights into the citation behaviour of researchers
• To discover features that distinguish papers with high impact
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48. Questions the system can help answering?
• What are the attributes of impact publications?
• Do these attributes differ in the humanities, social sciences and
computer sciences?
• What are the features of research groups within disciplines and
how do these features relate to contributions generated by the
group?
• What are the attributes of high-impact authors and what is their
role within the group?
• What are the dynamics of successful research groups?
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49. Questions the system can help answering?
• What is the mechanism of cross-fertilisation within
disciplines, especially between the humanities and the
sciences?
• Who are the authors whose work is worth monitoring because
they contribute to the achievements of their own discipline and
also inspire other disciplines?
• How should the novice in the discipline get acquainted with key
achievements in the discipline?
• How should he/she search for the most important publications?
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50. Summary
• The rapid growth of OA content provides both an opportunity as
well as a challenge.
• Aggregations should serve the needs of different user groups.
• Aggregations need to aggregate content, not just metadata.
• We can have many services that are part of the
infrastructure, but should work with the same data.
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51. Thank you!
Yes we can!
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