CORE review
A free, multidisciplinary route to open-access papers, theses, proceedings, and research data.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
CORE is a not-for-profit academic research database and open scholarly infrastructure service hosted by The Open University. It is designed for researchers, students, institutions, developers, and members of the public who need to discover openly accessible literature across disciplines. Its indexed content includes research papers, journal articles, preprints, theses, dissertations, conference proceedings, reports, and books. Search supports fields such as author, publication date, and field of study, while CORE Discovery helps locate freely accessible copies of papers.
Its strongest fit is breadth combined with practical access. The web service supports multidisciplinary literature discovery, the Chrome extension adds another route to open copies, and the recommender surfaces related scholarly articles. Developers can work with metadata and full texts through the CORE API, while bulk research data supports text and data analysis. For institutions and data providers, CORE also covers repository metadata and content management, versions and duplicates detection, open-access compliance, and FAIR-related tools. That combination makes it more than a conventional article search database, although some of its deeper workflow features are oriented toward institutional use.
CORE uses a freemium structure. The Starting plan includes the CORE Repository Dashboard, CORE Search, CORE Discovery, CORE Recommender, and general support. Supporting adds versions and duplicates detection, institutional CORE API access, technical support, and a Board of Supporters seat. Sustaining adds open-access compliance tools, FAIR-related tools, unlimited technical support, and CORE Dataset access for researchers. Individual users seeking free open-access discovery should choose CORE for its multidisciplinary reach and full-text focus. Institutions that need repository operations, compliance workflows, or expanded support should consider the paid membership tiers; users seeking a narrowly specialised database may prefer a subject-specific alternative.
CORE pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Free search with open-access full-text research discovery
- Multidisciplinary coverage includes theses, dissertations, and proceedings
- API, bulk data, Chrome extension, and related-article tools
- Where it doesn't
- Institutional API access is tied to the Supporting tier
- Repository and compliance tools target academic organisations
- The broad collection may suit discovery better than narrow subject research
CORE fact sheet, pricing and score →
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