From Andrea Bollini, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer,4Science
On November 16, 4Science announced to the DSpace Community the release of the 5.6(.1) version of DSpace-CRIS built on top of DSpace JSPUI 5.6: https://github.com/4Science/
Together with the new version, at the same time we released a new add-on module for DSpace(-CRIS) named DSpace-CKAN: https://github.com/4Science/
You can take a look at the result of our activities on a demo website running the latest available code for both DSpace-CRIS and the DSpace-CKAN integration module: https://dspace-cris.4science.
The release includes the security fixes already available in DSpace JSPUI 5.6, making it easier to upgrade from a recent DSpace version to DSpace-CRIS (no more need to run sql scripts manually) and brings a lot of new and exciting features:
- UI Extendibility: the webapp can now use the servlet 3.0 specification, enabling the creation and plug-in of external modules with their specific web UI components and pages. An extension point has been introduced to plugin viewers dedicated to particular bitstreams.
- Edit metadata for any DSpace Object via the UI: it is now possible to edit/add/remove metadata for Communities, Collections, Bundles and Bitstreams, to simplify the management of further functionalities based on custom metadata.
- Edit archived Items with UI submission: administrators can now edit archived or withdrawn items using the same UI available for submissions, exploiting functionalities such as dropdown, autocomplete, ORCID lookup, validation, etc.
- Deduplication tools (detect & merge): this administrative tool allows to check the database for potential duplicates and to merge the confirmed matches. During the submission, an alert is shown when a potential duplicate is detected. More information and screenshots available here https://wiki.duraspace.
org/display/DSPACECRIS/ deduplication+alert - Improved ORCiD synchronization: DSpace-CRIS now stores the internal identifier assigned by ORCiD to the publications in order to prevent record duplications when a local DSpace-CRIS update is pushed to ORCID ("put" code). In addition to that, DSpace-CRIS is now able to push to the ORCiD profiles educational and professional information of the researcher.
- Improved submission forms: among the new functionalities we can list the regex validation support, a framework for complex validation support, new input type “number” for submission and new input type “year” for submission.
- Improved security model for CRIS entities: every single CRIS object, object tab and object box can now be configured to be visible to specific users or user groups. An example of this would be when parts of a specific project description (such as costs) can be linked to the project participants, or the department director, or the research/contract office, etc.
- Automatic calculation of derived metrics: examples are average, maximum, minimum, variance of publication citation counts shown as metrics at the level of researcher, organization, project, and so on.
- Advanced import framework: border tables have been introduced to easily create ETL procedures to load and synchronize data, currently limited to publication, in the DSpace-CRIS installation.
- On-demand DOI registration: an administrative UI allows to register DOIs via DataCite or CrossRef for items matching configured criteria (theses, dataset, etc.). For each group it is possible to define the template used to generate the DOI and the metadata to deposit. The precalculated DOI can be revised by the administrator to allow complete personalization.
- Template service: the template item now supports the use of substitution variables bound to dynamic code plugged in as spring bean. The functionality allows the generation of default values dynamically generated in submission such as the timestamp, the details of the submitter, and so on.
- Creation of CRIS objects as part of the submission process: it allows users to create new CRIS objects (persons, projects, organizations, events, etc.) on demand as needed during the submission of a DSpaceitem. It can be even used to provide a workflow around the collection of data, including metrics, about CRIS entities.
As first implementation of the UI Extendibility we provide native support in DSpace-CRIS of the DSpace-CKAN Integration module. 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 enabled proxing in DSpace the CKAN Datastore API so to enforce the access condition defined in DSpace (Open Access, embargo, etc.). The dataset preview allows filtering, pagination and sorting, all the operation are performed on server side to save bandwidth overload. An example is visible here: https://dspace-cris.
A special thanks to Andrea Pascarelli, DSpace Committer and lead Engineer at 4Science, who put a lot of effort on this new release making it possible.