The DSpace-CRIS Community now has a new member, the Cyprus University of Technology, that made the decision to migrate from DSpace to DSpace-CRIS. 4Science was asked to provide them with the necessary support.

The Italian Center for Somali Studies has a rich collection of works deposited in the DSpace repository of the University of Rome 3. To make the collection available to their scholarly partners in Somalia (Africa), where the Internet broadband connection is not always available, the Center asked 4Science to produce an offline DSpace archive for consultation, reproducing the contents of the online database.

One of the most important developments in October was the release of DSpace 6.0 and DSpace 5.6, an important security and bug fix release, to resolve several issues in previous versions. Both versions were significantly supported by 4Science. Our commitment is to release the corresponding 5.6 version of DSpace-CRIS in the coming month of November, and soon after DSpace-CRIS 6.0.

In November 4Science will be in Athens for the euroCRIS Strategic Membership Meeting, where we will present the latest DSpace-CRIS developments, its new features, and important integrations with other systems. We will also talk about CRIS (RIMS), repositories and their role in Research Data Management.

Right after Athens, we will go to Brasilia where we are holding a 3-day workshop hosted by the Brazilian Institute of Technology and Science Information (IBICT) and supported by UNESCO. IBICT wants to develop a national scale project (similar to the Portuguese PTCRIS) to create a countrywide system capable of collecting research information from all the universities and research centers. They are looking at DSpace-CRIS as a crucial component of the platform.

The more institutions that join our community, the faster we’ll work on new and exciting features and enhancements for DSpace and DSpace-CRIS!