Petr Knoth

Timeline

1. 1996–2005

   Ice dancing with Petra Pachlová

   Born in Brno in 1983, he begins skating in 1996 and competes in ice dance with Petra Pachlová. The pair win the Czech national senior title, place 19th at the 2004 European Championships, and his skating career ends in 2005.

2. 2010

   The idea for CORE

   In 2010, he comes up with the idea of aggregating research papers as part of his doctoral work at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, so that the papers can be text-mined. In November 2010, he writes the first grant application for the project, asking for £40,000 to fund six months of work.

3. 2011–2013

   Launching CORE with Jisc

   With the first Jisc grant starting the CORE project in February 2011, he creates the first version of CORE to make very large collections of research papers easier to access and text mine. In 2013, Jisc recognises CORE as the official UK national open access aggregator after CORE wins a Jisc-commissioned tender.

4. By 2019

   Head of CORE

   By 2019, he is Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute and Studio Director of the Research Studio Data Science of RSA FG, and he heads CORE, which hosts over 14 million full text papers. CORE becomes the world's largest open access aggregator in December 2018.

5. 2023

   CORE-GPT wins Best Paper

   He coauthors CORE-GPT with David Pride and Matteo Cancellieri in 2023, a question-answering platform that combines GPT-based language models with more than 32 million full-text open access articles from CORE and returns citations with each answer. The paper wins the Best Paper award at the TPDL conference in Zadar, Croatia, in 2023.

6. 2025

   AI in grant peer review

   In October 2025, he and Francesco Osborne lead a 12-month project, funded with £106,078 from UKRI's Metascience Unit, to test how large language models can support grant peer review. In October 2025, he also gives a computer science talk at Yale University on CORE and on the CORE-GPT, SDG: Classify and SoFAIR work of his research group.

7. April 2026

   AI research assistants for EOSC

   At the CORE Board of Supporters meeting in April 2026, he gives a strategic update as Head of CORE. CORE announces its participation in a €9 million Horizon Europe project to develop AI-powered research assistants within the European Open Science Cloud.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor of Data Science

   He is Professor of Data Science at the Knowledge Media Institute of The Open University, where he leads the Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group, and Founder and Head of CORE. As of August 2025, CORE indexes over 400 million scholarly resources from repositories globally.