CORE (research service)

CORE (Connecting Repositories) is a global open access indexing service developed at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of The Open University, United Kingdom. It systematically indexes metadata and full text content from institutional and subject repositories, as well as open access and hybrid journals, to provide a comprehensive access to the world’s scholarly works.

CORE’s strongly supports the open access movement in scholarly communication by improving the discoverability, accessibility, and reuse of research outputs at scale.

The service underpins applications in a wide variety of areas including in systematic reviews, open access compliance monitoring, reproducibility of research software, training of LLMs, and analytics for funders and institutions.

As of August 2025, CORE indexes over 400 million scholarly resources from repositories globally, a measure of its reach and comprehensiveness within the scholarly ecosystem.

This represents a growth of 47% from an earlier report in 2023.The data is made available via a range of services, which currently reach over 30 million monthly users, highlighting CORE’s role as a major hub for open scientific knowledge.