We introduce and study a new class of $T_0$ spaces, called open well-filtered spaces. The main results we proved include (1) every well-filtered space is an open well-filtered space; (2) every core-compact open well-filtered space is sober. As an immediate corollary, we deduce that every core-compact well-filtered space is sober. This provides another different and relatively more straight forward method to answer the open problem posed by Jia and Jung: Is every core-compact well-filtered space sober?