With the next release of Open Access Helper, I will be deprecating support for the core.ac.uk Discover API.
First, I want to take a moment to sincerely thank the team at CORE for building and maintaining such an impressive open infrastructure for scholarly communication. Their dedication to open access and their support over the past year has been invaluable, and the work they do for the research community is truly commendable.
Why is this feature being removed?
The decision comes down to two factors: usage and focus. Analytics show that the CORE Discover integration has seen very little use among Open Access Helper users. At the same time, the extension’s support for Unpaywall — an open database of over 56 million free scholarly articles — has grown into a robust and reliable core feature. Unpaywall harvests Open Access content from more than 50,000 publishers and repositories, making it easy to find, track, and access free, legal research directly through Open Access Helper.
Maintaining two overlapping discovery integrations spreads development effort thin without meaningfully improving the experience for most users.
What does this mean for you?
If you’ve been relying on the CORE Discover integration, I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. I hope you’ll find that Unpaywall covers your needs well — and then some.
The core mission of Open Access Helper remains unchanged: connecting you to free & legal Open Access content alongside your library subscriptions, as seamlessly as possible.
Thank you for your understanding, and as always, thank you for using Open Access Helper.