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CORE Discovery

One-click access to free copies of research papers whenever you hit the paywall

CORE Discovery's screenshot

  • Overcome publishers' paywalls by discovering open access versions of papers

  • Backed by the world's largest dataset of open access full texts with over millions of monthly active users

  • Easy to install browser extension and seamless repository integration

CORE Discovery helps users to discover freely accessible copies of research papers. It is backed by our huge dataset of millions of full text open access papers as well as content from widely used external services beyond CORE. Discovery reduces the time it takes to access full texts of research papers and the frustration associated with hitting a paywall on the publisher's site. With CORE Discovery, you can be confident to benefit from the highest coverage of freely available copies of articles anywhere on the planet. So try it, it's free.

The tool is available as:

  • Browser extension for researchers and anyone interested in reading scientific documents
  • Plugin for repositories, enriching metadata only pages in repositories with links to freely available copies of the paper
  • API for developers and third party services

How it works?

Our service processes information from a wide number of authoritative scholarly data sources to discover, download and validate information about free availability of articles wherever they are located on the web. In this way, we are curating a vast database of freely available copies of articles. CORE Discovery has a preference for displaying first the open access content, originating from our approved content providers, and seeks alternative routes, providing access to free versions, only if they are not available from them.

Where to start

It’s free to install CORE Discovery in your browser. Using Google Chrome or Chromium, open the extension page on Web Store and click on the “Add to Chrome” button to install the extension.

The extension is also avilable for Mozilla Firefox and Opera users.

To install the CORE Discovery repository plugin, follow these instructions.

If you are interested in the integration of the CORE Discovery API in your repository, website or application please contact us.

What is included

Our free CORE Discovery service provides you with:

  • Highest coverage of freely available content. Our tests have shown that CORE Discovery delivers state-of-the-art performance compared to other discovery tools in terms of both content coverage (finding a freely available copy when it is available) and precision (reliably delivering a free copy of the paper on success).
  • Free service for researchers by researchers. CORE Discovery is the only free content discovery extension developed by researchers for researchers. There is no major publisher or enterprise controlling and profiting from your usage data.
  • Best grip on open repository content. Due to CORE being a leader in harvesting open access literature, CORE Discovery has the best grip on open content from open repositories as opposed to other services that disproportionately focus only on content indexed in major commercial databases.
  • Repository integration and discovering documents without a DOI. The only service offering seamless and free integration into repositories. CORE Discovery is also the only discovery system that can locate scientific content even for items with an unknown DOI or which do not have a DOI.