CORE

Not a post about a specific childcare resource today, but rather one about a general research tool which the site's users may find helpful...

In recent years, many Universities have begun to set up Open Access research repositories, where various academic papers, conference presentations, journal articles and more produced by the academics at these institutions can be found. Access to these collections is generally free, but finding the material relies on the user knowing where the item they want is held.

Now a new service called CORE aims to improve the visibility of these items by allowing users to search across 142 Open Access research repositories simultaneously. Once you've carried out your search, all of your results also have information about the authors, date, peer review etc of each item, so you know exactly what it is you're looking at, as well as a link to the full text.

I've carried out a few searches around various childcare / education topics, and was impressed with the range of material that's available out there. So it might be worth bookmarking this site in addition to the other places that you usually look for research information.