COREGOV-4-LIC: Strengthening CORE’s community governance with and for the benefit of academic institutions in low-income countries.

Petr Knoth

Funding Area: Community governance / Gobernanza comunitaria

Problem Statement: CORE (core.ac.uk) is an open not-for-profit infrastructure service operated by The Open University subscribing to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). As of June 2023, it is with over 30 million monthly active users a widely used aggregator of Open Access papers from repositories and journals around the world. CORE currently indexed over 255 million metadata records and hosts in excess of 30 million full text articles, aggregated from over 11,000 repositories in more than 150 countries. Over half of CORE users come from low and mid-income countries, with high usage of CORE in countries such as Indonesia, Philippines and India. Since December 2023, CORE has become a membership organisation (https://core.ac.uk/membership), currently financially supported by over 30 paying HEIs (CORE Supporting and Sustaining Members), and with hundreds of free CORE Starting Member Organisations. CORE Supporting and Sustaining members receive a range of benefits plus are invited to participate in CORE’s governance (https://core.ac.uk/governance), receiving a vote on CORE’s Board of Supporters (BoS) (https://core.ac.uk/governance/supporters). However, most of the BoS members currently come from high-income countries. The objective of this project is to provide CORE Membership benefits to institutions in low income countries and increase the participation of these low-income countries in CORE’s governance, improving the representation and equitability of CORE’s governance.

Proposed Activities: Freely grant (subsidise) CORE Sustaining Membership (https://core.ac.uk/membership) to 15 new organisations from low-income countries (we use the term “low-income” also for the lower-middle income economies according to World Bank classification). It is expected that this will: Directly assist institutions from low-income countries in a range of OA related management tasks, such as with increasing discoverability, interoperability, FAIRness and machine access to content. It will also help with safeguarding the content from these institutions against misuse through preventing plagiarism, identification of duplicate content, compliance with OA policies and PIDs management and assignment. Most importantly, increase the participation of low-income countries in CORE’s BoS, resulting in CORE’s development roadmap better reflecting the needs of institutions in low income countries. Increase the trust and equity of CORE and act as a seed funding to foster a more inclusive cooperation of CORE with academic partners in low-income economies. The cost of average Sustaining CORE Membership in low-income countries is about $4,000 p.a. per institution. By providing Sustaining Membership for 18 months to 15 institutions for free, CORE will deliver $67,500 of value to low-income countries for the cost of $25k to IOI, while improving the equity and representation of low income countries in this widely used OA infrastructure service. Month 1-4: Identify 15 institutions from low-income countries through a Call for Interest methodology. Institutions will be selected based on criteria including but not limited to commitment to the OA mission, potential benefit and willingness to contribute and become active members of CORE governance. The goal will be to achieve geographical distribution that will strengthen CORE’s governance and inclusiveness in terms of representation. Formalize agreements and onboard new members to CORE’s BoS. Month 5-6: Support the new members in a range of tasks, such as increasing discoverability, interoperability, and FAIRness of their repositories, duplicate content identification, and compliance with OA policies. Facilitate training and capacity-building programs for the newly onboarded organizations to enhance their OA management capabilities. Month 7-24: Regularly monitor and collect feedback from interviews and questionnaires intended for the members of the BoS. Use this to inform CORE’s development roadmap, ensuring it reflects the needs of institutions in low-income countries. Develop written use cases demonstrating evidence of benefit and impact. Promote collaboration and knowledge exchange between the new members and existing CORE members. Month 21-24: Prepare a report in the form of a public blog post highlighting the achievements, challenges, and lessons learned during the project. Develop strategies for sustaining the benefits and impact beyond the project's duration.

Openness: CORE is one of the subscribers to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). CORE’s mission is to index all open access resources worldwide and deliver unrestricted seamless access to them via its services. The proposed work increases the participation of low-income countries in the governance of CORE while delivering 15 new organizations from these low-income countries tools to help them more effectively manage their OA processes. This work will produce several case studies from working with HEIs from low-income countries which will be made publicly available on the CORE Blog and widely disseminated. Project outputs will be shared openly. We will also develop a dissemination plan to talk about the outputs and experiences from this project and the benefits of IOI funding at relevant conferences, such as Open Repositories and OAI and deliver a webinar for the community, e.g. in cooperation with Africa arXiv, Confederation of Open Access Repositories and/or UKSG. We will also work closely with IOI to seek and deliver on dissemination opportunities.

Challenges: While we acknowledge that there are many institutions from low-income countries that would like to receive the benefits of CORE Membership (hundreds of applications registered on the CORE Website), we cannot, due to resource limitations, provide the membership benefits to all yet. Selecting the 15 institutions we will waive CORE membership fees for might be challenging. We will address this by being transparent about the selection criteria. Resource Constraints: Adequate financial, technical, and human resources are essential for effective support and project implementation. We'll leverage our CORE support team. Diverse Needs and Capacities: Tailoring support to varying technical capacities while ensuring equity poses challenges. Cultural and Linguistic Barriers: Effective communication among diverse cultures and languages is crucial. Sustainability: Ensuring ongoing participation beyond the project's duration is crucial for CORE's sustainability. We'll support organizations in making their cases for continued membership. Coordination and Collaboration: Coordinating activities across time zones and work cultures requires careful planning. OA Policy Variations: Adapting CORE tools to local OA needs and regulations requires clear priorities. To overcome these, we'll engage stakeholders, communicate transparently, remain flexible, and regularly evaluate progress for successful project outcomes.

Neglectedness: We have not applied for this type of funding before. We are not aware of other sources of income that could be used to deliver this work. The project has a total full Economic Cost of $52,504.99 with requested funding of $25,000. The cost will cover 13.9% FTE over 2 years (3.34 person months) of effort of a Community Building and Outreach Specialist, Dr. David Pride. He will be responsible for the daily operation of this project, communication with members from low-income countries, their onboarding, etc. All technical additional costs associated with the delivery of Membership benefits to members from low-income countries will be born by CORE itself. The estimated value of the project delivered to institutions in low income countries is: $67,500 - 15 institutions Sustaining Membership over 18 months, i.e. we are requesting only 37% of resources that we will deliver in the form of a benefit to institutions in low-income countries. In order to be able to deliver these benefits, CORE will provide in-kind support and effectively subsidies low-income institutional members from other CORE income, including that from members in high-income countries.

Success: (1) New 15 CORE Members from low-income countries recruited. (2) New Members are on boarded onto the CORE Membership programme, understand its benefits and become regular users. We will measure how frequently they log-in to CORE Dashboard. (3) Use cases studies developed with the new members demonstrate measurable positive impact on the new members. These will be developed to specifically cover a variety of areas, for instance: (a) one member might have used CORE OA compliance features to improve their processes for depositing content into repositories faster (b) another might benefit from CORE’s deduplication features to clean up their OA repository (c) next one might benefit from CORE’s Recommender and increased discoverability of their research outputs (d) another might value metadata validation features and assistance with increasing interoperability of their repository (e) one might talk about the time and resources saved in terms of repository staff due to CORE Membership. (4) We will also measure the number of new HEIs from low-income countries that will decide to join CORE Membership outside of this subsidised programme inspired by the best practice example of the programme. (5) New features developed thanks to the interaction and directions from the CORE Members from low-income countries.

Total Budget: $25,000

Affiliations: CORE, The Open University, UK

LMIE Carveout: The CORE team has been traditionally distributed between the UK and Ukraine. While the UK (3 FTEs) is a high-income country, Ukraine (6 FTEs) is a lower-middle income country. Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, three of our Ukrainian staff have remained misplaced in Portugal, Lithuania and the Czechia. One post has been moved from Ukraine to Georgia. Two of our staff remain physically working from within Ukraine. The beneficiaries of this programme are restricted to low-income (low and lower-middle income in terms of the World Bank classification) countries. The proposed work provides a subsidy of approximately $67,500 in the form of waived CORE Membership fees to low-income countries, while creating a more inclusive and representative governance for this service.

Team Skills: The project will be guaranteed by Prof. Petr Knoth who will be the PI. He leads the KMI’s Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics group (BSDTAG) and is the founder and Head of CORE since 2011. He has served as a PI in over 20 European Commission, national and international funded research projects in the areas of data science, text-mining, open science and technology enhanced learning and has over 90 peer-reviewed publications based on this work. Dr. David Pride will serve as the Community Building and Outreach Specialist for the project. He is a Research Associate at The Knowledge Media Institute, part of the STEM faculty at the Open University. He completed his PhD. in 2020. David was also part of the team that recently completed work on the ON-MERRIT project, a Horizon 2020 project. The wider CORE team (https://core.ac.uk/about#team) has demonstrated, in previous experiences, that it possesses the skills and capabilities to deliver a project of this size, scale and duration. This project will be delivered alongside a larger CORE project activity and leverage this capacity to deliver the expected impact to low-income country communities.

How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)

Submission Number: 123