Dear all,

Book import was one of the long-standing wishes of the community at our university, especially of the humanities. For this, I’ve now developed a Directory of Open Access Books import plugin for EPrints that allows to specify a DOAB handle or DOI and imports the metadata as well as the PDF of books and book chapters in one step.

There’s a problem for which I haven’t found a solution yet. A book PDF may be several MByte and it may take a few seconds until it has been downloaded and attached by the plugin. As visual response, something like a spinner or progress bar should be shown to the user. However, after the form with handles/DOIs has been submitted, the calling screen can’t be modified anymore to display a spinner, and the target screen (either Manage Deposits or the first workflow step) is already too late. It should be something similar to the Upload workflow step (which however, stays on the same screen and involves heavy _javascript_, see lib/static/_javascript_/auto/88_uploadmethod_file.js ).

There would be two options in my opinion – either an intermediate screen – or some _javascript_ logic that displays (unhides) the spinner upon form submit. Has anybody already done something in this direction?

The same technique of direct download could be applied to our Crossref_DOI plugin, if the article can be identified as Gold OA (and we can identify it …). About 20-25% of our repo is Gold OA (2500 articles annually), which would be huge time saver for our submitters not having to manually add the fulltext document.

Also, we are currently thinking of developing an import plugin that makes use of the SRU interface provided by library catalogs, especially given now that most Swiss scientific libraries catalog in a single, central catalog (https://swisscovery.slsp.ch/)

Kind regards,

Martin