As a result of the recent announcement that Jisc will cease funding of CORE from the 1st August 2023. The UKCORR Committee have sent this open letter to Jisc today. A similar letter has also been sent to UKRI, which is also replicated in this blog post.
TO:
Heidi Fraser-Krauss, CEO, Jisc
Liam Earney, Managing Director HE and Research, and Executive Director of Digital Resources, Jisc
CC:
Jisc Executive Leadership Team
CORE as essential open scholarly infrastructure, supporting open research, repositories, and research intelligence
An open letter from UKCORR to Jisc regarding the suspension of funding to core.ac.uk
The United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR) represents a diverse group of almost 700 UK staff working within higher education institutions (HEIs) and research libraries. Its members occupy important positions within the areas of UK open research, scholarly communications, and open repositories and they influence strategic thinking within the open intellectual space at their respective institutions. We are therefore writing to express our alarm at the recent decision by Jisc to suspend its funding of CORE (core.ac.uk) and urge Jisc to reconsider its decision.
In its 10-year history, CORE has grown to become an essential component of global open scholarly infrastructure; but it is also an important expression of the UK’s leadership within open research. Jisc’s vision is for the UK to be a ‘world leader in technology for education, research and innovation’. Suspending funding to such an important component of open scholarly infrastructure seems antithetical to this. Indeed, the Jisc decision, and its underlying rationale, is one that UKCORR and its members find bewildering.
CORE’s contribution to UK open research is vast. It represents the largest scholarly content aggregation source in the world and thereby enables the discovery of research content hosted on UK repositories. CORE has evolved to become a service platform upon which numerous services operate. Its underpinning of Open Access monitoring and compliance reporting for the recent REF 2021 highlights CORE’s centrality to mainstream research intelligence within the UK. CORE is the crystallisation of the ‘network effect’; with more aggregation and more data come new opportunities for innovation. Some of these recent innovations promote repository content discovery (e.g. CORE Discovery, CORE Recommender, etc.), while others perform an important contribution to the wider scholarly graph of research, whether this is supplying compliant data on behalf of UK repositories to OpenAIRE, or whether it is delivering repository analytics to UK institutions. We must not dismiss CORE’s advocacy role either, helping to promote HEIs in raising the quality of their metadata and encouraging compliance with metadata best practice and extant schema.
Perhaps most importantly, CORE is the largest open corpus optimised for text and data mining (TDM). For those UK researchers who pursue TDM approaches to their research, CORE has become indispensable. Its provision of programmatic data access (as well as raw data) goes well beyond any comparable service. CORE is, in other words, ‘big data’. It is advocated as such by UKCORR members as the optimal TDM source for UK scholars. It is consequently a wellspring of computationally derived knowledge, particularly through advances in text analytics, biomedical natural language processing, and machine learning.
Arising from its funding suspension, UKCORR has noted that CORE is exploring the viability of a membership model to replenish its financial shortfall. It is UKCORR’s view that such a membership model would threaten the viability of CORE and only seek to compromise the efficacy of the UK’s open research infrastructure.
Inequity in open research has become a pertinent issue in recent years. Membership would enforce an inequitable dynamic across UK HEIs and research libraries, as less wealthy or less research-intensive institutions become locked out of CORE’s benefits. It is also our view that, were membership to be the financial model adopted, an insufficient number of members would be secured to ensure CORE’s financial viability and that these members would come disproportionately from wealthier institutions, once again reinforcing UK research inequities. Therefore, moving away from the current collective funding model, with Jisc representing all its members’ interests, seems like a retrograde step. The reason that HEIs pay subscriptions to Jisc is precisely so that it can make investments that are beyond the means of individual institutions, for the benefit of us all. Perhaps the UK library and repository communities have not been clear enough in our collective need for CORE we hope this letter demonstrates how much we value the service. We also note that Jisc’s decision to suspend funding has been taken relatively suddenly, meaning that even if some institutions wished to become members, they would likely be unable to allocate the necessary funding within current budgetary cycles. The only path towards a membership model that might offer a modicum of success would be if CORE membership was incorporated into the core subscription for Jisc member organisations. This may be something you wish to comment upon.
UKCORR recognises that recent economic events may place certain budgetary constraints on organisations. This will doubtless entail difficult decisions at Jisc in forthcoming financial cycles. However, it appears that the decision to suspend CORE funding was taken prior to the UK’s recent economic and financial jeopardy. We would therefore like to again appeal to Jisc to reconsider, and ideally reverse, its decision to suspend CORE’s funding.
The real risk is that CORE becomes financially unviable and is eventually retired. For the reasons we have stated above, such an event would be disastrous for the reputation of open research in the UK. But were it to happen, it is more than likely Jisc would only have to replace CORE with something resembling it several years hence. For this decision to be made before the outcome of the Future Research Assessment Programme seems like curious timing whatever the shape of the next research assessment exercise, CORE is likely to play a crucial role once again.
Committee of the United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR),
on behalf of UKCORR members.
United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR)
09 November 2022
TO:
Steven Hill, Director of Research, UKRI
Rachel Bruce, Head of Open Research, UKRI
Andy Hepburn, Head of Analysis, UKRI
Tahia Zaidi, Senior Strategy Advisor, UKRI
CC:
Jisc Open Research Advisory Board
CORE as essential open scholarly infrastructure, supporting open research, repositories, and research intelligence
An open letter from UKCORR to UKRI regarding the suspension of funding to core.ac.uk by Jisc
The United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR) represents a diverse group of almost 700 UK staff working within higher education institutions (HEIs) and research libraries. Its members occupy important positions within the areas of UK open research, scholarly communications, and open repositories and they influence strategic thinking within the open intellectual space at their respective institutions. We are therefore writing to express our alarm at the recent decision by Jisc to suspend its funding of CORE (core.ac.uk) and urge UKRI to join us in recommending that Jisc reconsider its decision.
In its 10-year history, CORE has grown to become an essential component of global open scholarly infrastructure; but it is also an important expression of the UK’s leadership within open research. Jisc’s vision is for the UK to be a ‘world leader in technology for education, research and innovation’. Suspending funding to such an important component of open scholarly infrastructure seems antithetical to this, particularly at a time when UKRI is attempting to better embed open research with UK academia. Indeed, the Jisc decision, and its underlying rationale, is one that UKCORR and its members find bewildering.
CORE’s contribution to UK open research is vast. It represents the largest content aggregation source in the world and thereby promotes the dissemination of research content hosted on UK repositories. CORE has evolved to become a service platform upon which numerous services operate. Its underpinning of Open Access monitoring and compliance reporting for the recent REF 2021 highlights CORE’s centrality to key UKRI operational concerns. CORE is, however, the crystallisation of the ‘network effect’; with more aggregation and more data come new opportunities for innovation. Some of these recent innovations promote repository content discovery, while others perform an important contribution to the wider scholarly graph of research, whether this is supplying compliant data on behalf of UK repositories to OpenAIRE, or whether it is delivering repository analytics to UK institutions. We must not dismiss CORE’s advocacy role either, helping to promote HEIs in raising the quality of their metadata and encouraging compliance with metadata best practice and extant schema.
Perhaps most importantly, CORE is the largest open corpus optimised for text and data mining (TDM). For those UK researchers who pursue TDM approaches to their research, CORE has become indispensable. Its provision of programmatic data access (as well as raw data) goes well beyond any comparable service. CORE is, in other words, ‘big data’. It is advocated as such by UKCORR members as the optimal TDM source for UK scholars. It is consequently a wellspring of computationally derived knowledge, particularly through advances in text analytics, biomedical natural language processing, and machine learning.
Arising from its funding suspension, UKCORR has noted that CORE is exploring the viability of a membership model to replenish its financial shortfall. It is UKCORR’s view that such a membership model would threaten the viability of CORE and only seek to compromise the efficacy of the UK’s open research infrastructure. Inequity in open research has become a pertinent issue in recent years. Membership would enforce an inequitable dynamic across UK HEIs and research libraries, as less wealthy or less research-intensive institutions become locked out of CORE’s benefits. It is also our view that, were membership to be the financial model adopted, an insufficient number of members would be secured to ensure CORE’s financial viability – and that these members would come disproportionately from wealthier institutions, once again reinforcing UK research inequities. We also note that Jisc’s decision to suspend funding has been taken relatively suddenly, meaning that even if some institutions wished to become members, they would likely be unable to allocate the necessary funding within current budgetary cycles. The only path towards a membership model that might offer a modicum of success would be if CORE membership was incorporated into the core subscription for Jisc member organisations.
UKCORR recognises that recent economic events may place certain budgetary constraints on organisations. This will doubtless entail difficult decisions at Jisc in forthcoming financial cycles. However, it appears that the decision to suspend CORE funding was taken prior to the UK’s recent economic and financial jeopardy. We would therefore like to again appeal to UKRI to support UKCORR in requesting that Jisc reconsider, and ideally reverse, its decision to suspend CORE’s funding. UKRI could do this by using its influence, including as a member of the Jisc Open Research Advisory Board, to articulate the need of UK HEIs and their wish to see Jisc maintain its financial support of CORE. It could also express dissatisfaction that consultation with Jisc members was not conducted prior to the decision to suspend CORE funding.
The real risk is that CORE becomes financially unviable and is eventually retired. For the reasons we have stated above, such an event would be disastrous for the reputation of open research in the UK. But were it to happen, it is more than likely Jisc would only have to replace CORE with something resembling it several years hence, not least to support the strategic goals of UKRI.
Committee of the United Kingdom Council of Open Research and Repositories (UKCORR),
on behalf of UKCORR members.