CORE provides a comprehensive bibliographic database of research outputs globally.

We work directly with thousands of repositories and the number of repositories in CORE is constantly growing. This enables inclusive global coverage across institutions, disciplines, and regions, including content often underrepresented elsewhere.

CORE constitutes the world's largest collection of open access scholarly documents.

This corpus underpins discovery, analysis, and facilitates innovation across the global research ecosystem.

CORE provides machine-readable full text access via our data services (API, Dataset, FastSync), enabling the text and data mining of research content, AI research, and large-scale analysis.

While many scholarly infrastructures only provide links to content, making access to this content cumbersome for machines, CORE is a true text mining enabler, positioning CORE as a foundational open scholarly infrastructure for responsible AI development as well as advancing and streamlining research processes.

CORE's content is not just a copy of data in well-known scholarly infrastructures, such as those registering DOIs. A significant proportion of CORE's content does not have registered DOIs, meaning that we serve unique corpora often not available from scholarly indexing systems, aggregators and bibliographic databases. This includes documents such as theses, research reports, preprints and papers from many, even high-profile academic venues that are not embedded in the DOI system.

By doing so, CORE helps ensure that valuable research outputs are not excluded from discovery due to infrastructure or publishing constraints.

CORE ensures we always provide metadata with clear provenance information to the source data provider.

This means that while CORE conducts normalisation and metadata enrichment, it is always possible to understand which data sources have been used. This transparency supports trust, attribution, and responsible reuse of repository data.

From our API, it is always possible to access metadata in exactly the way in which it is provided by our data providers.

This means that we support authoritative, faithful and transparent exposition of metadata in exactly the way supplied by our providers.

Repositories can therefore rely on CORE as a reliable steward of their authoritative metadata rather than an opaque intermediary they can hardly control. This is a very unique feature of CORE among scholarly infrastructures and bibliographic databases, which typically exercise strict ownership over scholarly metadata with little ability for metadata creators to be able to remain in control and correct issues.

CORE operates under a community funding and governance model.

We are building CORE from philanthropic and community-aligned support, ensuring decisions are driven by shared values, community stakeholders are able to influence CORE's direction and development.

This ensures that CORE evolves in response to real community needs rather than commercial incentives.

Our governance model is designed to represent and protect the interests of repositories and open scholarly infrastructures.

While even commercial stakeholders are able to use CORE and help to subsidise CORE's operation, our Board of Supporters, our governance body which prioritises CORE's development roadmap, is exclusively reserved for open repositories participation, ensuring alignment of our work with community values and priorities. This governance structure safeguards CORE's mission and ensures accountability to the scholarly community it serves.

CORE distributes no dividends to shareholders. All income graciously received is invested in the operation and sustainability of CORE, i.e. to fund staff costs, infrastructure costs, etc.

Every contribution directly supports the maintenance, improvement, and resilience of CORE's services.

We have been around for more than 15 years and have a strong record in sustaining our infrastructure long-term, regardless of changing external circumstances. This track record demonstrates CORE's reliability as a global open scholarly infrastructure.

As opposed to some other scholarly infrastructures, we are not dependent on a single large philanthropic donor, ensuring our actions are controlled by the community we serve and not by a single entity.

We are committed to a distributed funding model, which we believe is key to long-term stability and resilience. This approach reduces dependency risk, strengthens community ownership, and supports continuity even in changing funding environments.

CORE has been conceived by researchers and it continues to be led by researchers ensuring alignment with its original mission and the researchers community.

Built with a deep understanding of scholarly workflows and needs. This perspective informs CORE's technical design and service development.

While others build platforms on top of open research, CORE builds infrastructure with the open research community in mind and gives back to it. Our services are shaped through ongoing collaboration with repositories, researchers, and partners.

CORE believes that academic institutions need to be strategically enabled to keep track of all scholarly resources authored by their academics. Metadata of these resources should be made openly available by these institutions via their repositories as this is a cornerstone of a FAIR decentralised open repositories ecosystem.

CORE advocates for the above vision and actively supports its fulfilment by helping data providers to achieve it, including:

• Increasing awareness of the importance of this vision for the scholarly ecosystem
• Providing tools, guidance, and feedback to help repositories improve metadata quality and compliance in the form of the CORE Dashboard

Through this work, CORE acts as an active partner in strengthening repository practice globally.

CORE actively helps repositories remain interoperable across the global ecosystem. This support includes methodical, technological, and standardisation support.

We support shared standards and practices so repositories are not locked into closed or proprietary pipelines. This protects institutional autonomy and supports long-term FAIR alignment.

CORE is a leading voice actively participating in working groups addressing a wide variety of issues concerning open repositories infrastructure.

We have been supporting standards creation (e.g. metadata schemas, next generation repositories, etc.) and adoption, technology support for open access compliance and driving up discoverability in repositories as well as addressing pressing problems of the open scholarly infrastructures community, such as AI bots. CORE combines infrastructure delivery with thought leadership across the open research landscape.