Good luck to all those who responded to the JISC call for ORCID pilot projects.
Looking for inspiration and/or code examples? EPrints Services developer Peter West has created an “Import from ORCID” plugin which is now available from the EPrints Bazaar.
Jisc call for ORCID pilot projects
Interested in exploring how you can use ORCID to enhance author identity management in your EPrints repository service?
Jisc are inviting proposals for small pilot projects which will help understand how ORCID can be leveraged effectively in UK HEIs.
Deadline for submissions: 21 March 2014 12:00
A technical article by Tim Miles-Board (tmb at ecs.soton.ac.uk), EPrints Services developer
Carry out a search in EPrints and it is simple to export the results into a number of different formats.
What you might not know is that each export has a special URL which contains all the information needed to carry out the search again. Whenever you access this URL EPrints will re-run the search and export the new list of results – so you effectively have a live feed of search results in your chosen format. This can be a useful technique for feeding data to (for example) a Web portal – just copy and paste the URL from EPrints into your CMS.
A customer took this a step further by creating a saved search for each data feed that would be used in their CMS – this gave them a useful way to label and manage each feed.
In 3.2, it is possible to export everything matched by a saved search – this gives you a URL like this:
This works in exactly the same way as a search export – EPrints loads the appropriate saved search, re-runs it and then exports the results in the chosen format (in this case some specially crafted XML). So for our customer it was then a simple case of copying and pasting these saved search export URLs into their CMS.
However when the customer upgraded to version 3.3, they found that these URLs were no longer supported – instead of the expected XML they now got redirected to the normal (HTML) search results page you would see in a browser.
We considered 2 approaches to resolving this:
1) Migrate to CRUD API
3.3 introduced a CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) API which allows data and files to be manipulated directly without using the normal Web UI. For example, the following will grab metadata about a saved search (note not the items it matches!) in Atom XML:
$ curl -X GET -i -H ‘Accept: application/atom+xml’ http://myrepository.com/id/saved_search/123
There is currently no way to export the list of items matched by a saved search – so we proposed extending CRUD like this:
$ curl -X GET -i -H ‘Accept: application/atom+xml’ http://myrepository.com/id/saved_search/123/contents
The “contents” modifier is already used to access files attached to a given item, or items owned by a given user – so it seems to make sense to extend it to mean “list of items matched” in the context of a saved search (find out more on github). This would make the URLs used in the CMS much simpler, but the existing URLs would all need to be changed and the CMS would need to be able to add custom HTTP Accept headers to the request to specify the desired format.
2) Support legacy URLs
We coded a simple extension to /cgi/saved_search which adds support for legacy export URLs in 3.3:
# intercept legacy export URL
if( defined $repo->param( "_action_export" ) && $repo->param( "_action_export" ) eq "1" && defined $repo->param( "_output" ) )
{
my $format = $repo->param( "_output" );
my $plugin = $repo->plugin( "Export::$format" );
# security - check plugin is publicly visible and saved search is allowed to be viewed
if( defined $plugin && $plugin->param( "visible" ) eq "all" && $saved_search->permit( "saved_search/view" ) )
{
$repo->send_http_header( "content_type"=>$plugin->param( "mimetype" ) );
# export items matching saved search
print $saved_search->make_searchexp->perform_search->export( $format );
exit;
}
}
This would require no changes to the existing CMS setup.
Conclusion
We decided that the best approach for our customer was to add support for legacy URLs in the short term, and plan to migrate to the CRUD API in the longer term, once support for exporting items matching a saved search is available in a release version of EPrints.
The EPrints community will be holding its next major user group meeting in conjunction with the Open Repositories 2014 conference in Helsinki, Finland.
As always, the EPrints Services team will be well represented at the conference, and we plan to talk about our work on Data Repositories and share our future development plans for the EPrints software. We will also provide as many opportunities as possible for you to talk to the team throughout the conference – from drop-in clinics for help with specific EPrints problems, to more general discussion sessions – not forgetting social events!
We also have a developer challenge title to defend!
How to get involved
* Submit a proposal – it’s not too late to submit a proposal for a presentation or discussion on any novel experiences or developments related to EPrints. You can be informed – but not constrained! – by the themes of the general conference (http://or2014.helsinki.fi/?page_id=281) but we’d also be very interested to hear about your experiences, plans, worries or ambitions for Data Repositories.
* Join us – whether you’re a developer, researcher, repository manager, administrator or practitioner this is a great opportunity to network with the team and other members of the EPrints community, share problems and experiences, and have your say on the future development of the EPrints software.
Important dates
3 February 2014: Deadline for proposal submissions
17 April 2013: Submitters notified of acceptance to interest groups
12-13 June 2013: EPrints Interest Group program
All the details
General Conference Theme: Towards Repository Ecosystems
Conference dates: 9-13 June 2014
Conference location: Helsinki, Finland
Conference website: http://or2014.helsinki.fi/
For enquiries, please contact the EPrints Interest Group Chair, William Nixon or EPrints Services.
The Open Repositories series is always enjoyable, informative and influential – we hope you can be there to share the experience with us.
The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) is seeking comments on the draft recommended practice Open Access Metadata and Indicators (NISO RP-22-201x).
NISO is US based, but the Working Group includes many international representatives.
The purpose of the recommendation is to provide a simple mechanism for:
Is anyone interested? Worried about it? Planning to look at it? Ignoring it?
Our executive summary
Two core pieces of metadata:
<free_to_read> – status flag
Optional: start_date
Optional: end_date
<license_ref> – URI
Optional: start_date
Multiple license_ref elements can be specified.
NISO announcement: http://www.niso.org/news/pr/view?item_key=a935910304850769889b5cbd73f54a0412d61e7e
The draft recommended practice is open for public comment until 4 February 2014. To download the draft or submit online comments, visit the Open Access Metadata and Indicators webpage at: www.niso.org/workrooms/oami/.
We attended the EPrints User Group meeting, very efficiently hosted by Nicola Siminson and Robin Burgess on a mild December day at The Glasgow School of Art, where before getting down to the main business of the day we had a chance to admire some fine examples of the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and other more contemporary architects.
The full agenda for the meeting is listed elsewhere (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/eprints-user-group-tickets-9509470081) with additional detail and follow-up discussion being shared on the EPrints UK User Group forum (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!aboutgroup/eprints-uk-user-group).
At the meeting we took the opportunity to present an overview of EPrints Services activities in 2013 which we will summarise in this post.
OpenDOAR reports approx. 50[1] new EPrints-based repositories registered this year (http://www.opendoar.org/). EPrints Services has also helped a number of repositories take their first steps in 2013:
At the beginning of the year we announced that we were focusing on the following areas of development: Research Data, Reporting, and Validation. We presented a brief summary of our progress in these three areas:
Research Data: We have leveraged the ReCollect plugin for EPrints (http://wiki.eprints.org/w/ReCollect) to support the RDM strategies of the University of Southampton, University of Bath and the University of the Arts London. We have also supported Arkivum in their development of an A-Stor storage plugin for EPrints (http://bazaar.eprints.org/313/). We anticipate much more activity in this arena in the coming year in response to RCUK’s OA policy and the need to achieve full compliance with EPSRC requirements for research data by May 2015.
Reporting: Our major focus in 2013 was to support institutions in the UK using the REF2014 plugin for EPrints (http://www.eprints.org/ref2014/) to help manage their REF2014 submission. We have received very positive feedback from institutions who used the plugin and some excellent suggestions for enhancing the plugin to support preparations for REF2020. In other areas we have been working with a small group of early adopters to develop facilities for automated submissions to the RCUK Research Outcomes System (ROS) and the handling of Article Processing Charges (APCs).
Validation: We have developed a publication-matching tool which allows an institution to upload a list of known published outputs and then attempts to match each published output against an item in the repository as an indicator of the completeness and correctness of the repository holdings. With the University of Zurich we have developed an EPrints-based “Repository of Journals” which manages information about journals, including publisher and institutional-level policies from various sources and integrates with an EPrints institutional repository to provide both an authority list of journal information and policy guidance for the depositor.
For further details or enquiries about any of the above developments please contact Andrew Bell (a.d.bell@ecs.soton.ac.uk).
[1] We looked at the RSS feed for new EPrints repositories and counted the entries where the “Date Added” was in 2013: http://opendoar.org/rss1data.php?rss=&step=20&rSoftWareName=EPrints&format=summary&sort=r.rName
Historically, EPrints development has been driven by a research agenda – primarily through JISC funding in the UK. However our newly appointed lead developer Sebastien Francois is funded directly by EPrints Services. As the primary role of EPrints Services is to provide services to the EPrints community we see the needs of the community having a much greater influence on the direction of the EPrints software going forward. We see this is a very positive change for EPrints and the EPrints community.
In the wake of OA-Tage 2013 and the associated well-attended EPrints User Group Meeting, we introduce a new German User Group page on the wiki. Viel Spass!
After several years as the lead developer of the EPrints software, Tim Brody decided to leave the team in July.
We’re pleased to announce that effective from October 1st we have appointed Sebastien Francois as the new lead developer of EPrints. Seb has a long history with EPrints and has been part of the EPrints Services team since 2007.
You can get in touch with Seb via the technical mailing list, our GitHub repository or tweet him @eprintsservices
EPrints Services 