From Andrea Bollini, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, 4Science
DSpace-CRIS is an open-source extension of DSpace that includes functionality useful for CRIS (Current Researcher Information System) users. DSpace-CRIS enables ingestion, storage, display and management of metadata and fulltext of all research-related components that can include publications, projects, grants, patents, organization units and researcher profiles (people).
We are pleased to announce that the 6 RC (Release Candidate) version of DSpace-CRIS, built on top of the upcoming DSpace JSPUI 6.1, is now available:
• https://github.com/4Science/DSpace/tree/dspace-cris-6RC together with the new version of DSpace-CKAN, a DSpace(-CRIS) add-on module: https://github.com/4Science/dspace-ckan
• The testdrive website that now runs the latest available code of DSpace-CRIS and the DSpace-CKAN integration module has been updated: http:/
We invite you to work on the 6 RC version of DSpace-CRIS, and provide feedback in order to help solve any issues we prior to the final release, which is expected to be shortly after the official release of DSpace 6.1 (see DSpace 6.1 Status).
The release, which is the first one on the 6 version, includes all the fixes that will also be available in DSpace JSPUI 6.1. A special thanks to Andrea Pascarelli, DSpace Committer and lead Engineer at 4Science, who put a lot of effort into this new release making it possible.
Please find below the list of the new features and improvements that are now available:
• The CORE Recommender Engine integration: Display documents that are semantically similar. Powered by CORE https://core.ac.uk/. You can take a look at our example here: https://dspace-cris.4science.it/handle/123456789/102
• Authority Lookup based on Getty Vocabularies: For more information about Getty Vocabularies please check https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/index.html; DSpace-CRIS implementation involves both the “Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online” (https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/index.html) and “The Union List of Artist Names” (ULAN – https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/ulan/index.html)
• Authority Lookup based on Viaf service: The VIAF® (Virtual International Authority File) combines multiple name authority files into a single OCLC-hosted name authority service. More info at https://viaf.org/
• Import ORCiD publications via Submission Data Loader: During the submission process, users can choose an ORCiD and check which publication to import
• Cookies Policy Popup: this feature allows easy compliance with the EU legislation on cookies
• Other minor improvements: it’s now possible to clean Solr statistics entries via WebUI; to upgrade Hibernate and Spring to the minor version; we have improved the automatic calculation of derived metrics and the creation of CRIS objects as part of the submission process
• Other minor fixes: the out-of-box DSpace OAI Harvesting in DSpace-CRIS; the DSpace-CRIS SOAP web-services; the DSpace-CRIS Network when users try to show many graphs
As for DSpace 6, the most important things we worked on are “behind the scenes” and are technical changes in preparation of DSpace(-CRIS) 7.
Our goal was to make this release as stable as possible but it is undisputable that the underline persistent layer of DSpace 6 is too young and not intensively tested on and optimized for large site yet. We suggest developers to use version 6 either if they need to make extensive customizations on the business layer or if they want to contribute to DSpace(-CRIS) 7. For standard use of DSpace-CRIS, the version 5.x will be a more solid choice. For these reasons we are also working on a new DSpace-CRIS 5.7 release that will be finalized just after the cut of the official DSpace 5.7 (DSpace 5.7 Status). The DSpace-CRIS 5.7 version will include all of the above mentioned new features & improvements.
As mentioned above, we have also updated the DSpace-CKAN Integration module to work with the new version. DSpace-CKAN allows an in-depth integration between DSpace and CKAN. Tabular data (CSV, XLS, etc.) are deposited in a CKAN instance through a curation task. The preview of the dataset content is provided by DSpace that serves as a proxy for the CKAN Datastore API respecting the defined access conditions (Open Access, embargo, etc.). The dataset preview allows filtering, pagination and sorting and, in addition to that, all the operation are performed on the server side so to save bandwidth overload. An example is available here: https://dspace-cris.4science.it/handle/123456789/31