We are happy to share with all of you two important announcements: the availability of the 6 RC version of DSpace-CRIS (https://github.com/4Science/DSpace/tree/dspace-cris-6RC) built on top of the upcoming DSpace JSPUI 6.1 and the new version of DSpace-CKAN, a DSpace(-CRIS) add-on module (https://github.com/4Science/dspace-ckan).

We kindly invite all of you to work on it and provide tests for this version in order for us to solve any critical issue we find before the final release, which is expected to be shortly after the official release of DSpace 6.1 (see DSpace 6.1 Status).

The testdrive website we run has been updated for the latest available code of DSpace-CRIS and the DSpace-CKAN integration module and you can find it here: http://test.dspace-cris.4science.it/

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.

This release comes with several new features and improvements, such as:

  • 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 serviceThe 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

The other important news is the update of the DSpace-CKAN Integration module that now works 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

A special thanks to Andrea Pascarelli, DSpace Committer and lead Engineer at 4Science, who put a lot of effort on this new release and made it it possible!