Our society is facing significant challenges due to the widespread misinformation, in particular on social media, substantially influencing public opinion. As a result, we are seeing a lot of demand for innovative text processing methods to fact check and provide automatic assessment of trustworthiness and credibility. Machine learning and natural language processing have started to be widely used to address this problem.
While scientific papers have been traditionally seen as a source of mostly trustworthy information, their use within automated tools in the fight against misinformation, such as related to vaccine effectiveness or climate changes, has been rather limited.
At CORE, we are committed to a more transparent society, free of misinformation. Our data services, providing access to machine readable information from across the global network of open repositories are a treasure trove for this use case.
We are therefore excited to support an innovative startup, Consensus, a search engine designed to perform evidence retrieval and assessment over scientific insights.
Dr Petr Knoth, the Head of CORE says:
“Consensus tries to develop technology that will make it easier for users to understand which claims are grounded in scientific evidence. This aligns perfectly with the CORE, as well as The Open University’s, mission and it is great to see our data powering such an initiative.”
Eric Olson, Consensus’ Co-founder and CEO says:
“To build the product we have always envisioned, having a robust and comprehensive dataset of machine-readable, peer-reviewed papers is absolutely essential. We are incredibly grateful to be able to partner with an organization like CORE that not only can meet our data needs, but also shares our vision of making science more accessible and consumable. This unique combination of best-in-class data-offering and mission-alignment makes CORE an ideal partner for Consensus.”
Consensus aims to provide users with better evidence-based answers faster and easier than ever before. To accomplish this, we are building an academic search platform that uses natural language processing to provide aggregated scientific insights from peer-reviewed sources, instantly. Our goal is to give users a comprehensive view of the scientific evidence to their question with a click of a button.
CORE is the world’s largest aggregator of scientific open access content from across the world. CORE has developed a set of services to assist the scientific community with the development of applications that require machine access to research content, enabling others searching for solutions to important scientific and societal challenges.