As an eventful 2016 draws to a close, we at EPrints HQ would like to wish the entire EPrints community a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
This has been another busy year for our EPrints Services team with lots of activity around repositories for Impact, Research data, Education and of course Publications. The following are just a few of the activity areas we have been working on:
REF Compliance Checker plugin
Developed and released by Jisc in January of this year, this plugin for EPrints provides a straightforward means by which you can check whether an article or conference proceeding in your EPrints repository is eligible for the post-2014 REF. Since the initial release we have been making a number of improvements to the plugin as a result of feedback from our customer base. The latest version of this plugin is available from the bazaar. Find out more here.
EdShare
During Open Education 2016 week in March, we announced EdShare, our open educational resources (OER) sharing platform was now available on the latest EPrints 3.3 core. This year has seen a flurry of activity for EdShare, including the launch of edShare@GCU from Glasgow Caledonian University and our Open Education Lead, Kelly Terrell presenting at a number of conferences including Open Repositories 2016 and Association for Learning Technology 2016. Find out more.
If you are new to EdShare, you can watch Kelly’s webinar ‘Introduction to EdShare’ which was part of the ALT Online Winter Conference via the following links [webinar] [slides only].
Conferences
We’ve been meeting lots of you at various events this year including Open Repositories, Repository Fringe, EPrints UK User Group and many more.
Google Scholar
A number of repository managers have reported lower than expected results when searching for their content on Google Scholar. We have been working closely with Google Scholar to increase EPrints’ visibility to the GS crawler. We are currently trialling some code changes which will help existing repositories with this, and expect to roll these out more widely in the new year. Watch this space!
ORCID
During Open Access week in October, we announced the release of our ORCID bazaar plugin. Created by our EPrints Developer, Will Fyson this plugin offers the groundwork for future ORCID integration with EPrints. This plugin arrives in the wake of Liz Jennings’ and Helen Cooper’s report, “ORCID EPrints Implementation Survey Analysis”, the “ORCID API and use case workshop: Jisc UK consortium member’s event” held in Birmingham earlier this month, and the subsequent hackday. More information here.
EPrints 3.4
During Open Repositories 2016 in Dublin we announced the first preview release of EPrints 3.4 for the community to review. This activity has been taken forward by our Technical Lead, Justin Bradley and our Core Developer, Jiadi Yao. Specifically designed to be flexible outside the OA publications domain, we are now using 3.4 for new projects including a new ‘Impact’ flavour – this solution will allow researchers to capture impact related data and allow institutions to gain an insight into their research activities, from influencing policy through to public engagement outreach.
We hope that 2016 has been a successful year for your EPrints repository, and we look forward to working with you in 2017. If you are interested in knowing more about the services offered by EPrints Services to help support your repository, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.