This is a brief statement about what we are up to and where we are going, with respect to technical developments.  In relation to the wider EPrints community, rather than just our customers, or internally.

Updated October 2018 by Justin Bradley.

What we are doing currently?

EPrints 3.4.1 development, we will release publicly once complete.

(Our existing EPrints 3.4 hosted customers will receive an upgrade automatically.)

3.4.1 is a minor update on 3.4.0, with a small number of internal changes mostly related to making the system more flexible.

A number of our ingredients will be available with 3.4.1

• Date picker, allowing date input fields to use a jQuery based date or date range picker.
• Rich text editor, allowing rich text to be entered, to be rendered as HTML.  A drop in replacement for what has traditionally been a multiline plain text form input.
• “Annotations” support.  A first version of a new type of plugin, which supports being able to add arbitrary metadata to parts of the existing EPrints system. Eg administrative notes about a particular eprint field, or record.  Or a threaded discussion on a deposited item or normal page. Can be used to communicate or record provenance or even usage information about data within the system.

We’ll also be sharing our Impact flavour, as commissioned by University of Glasgow, along with source code for some of our example flavours used in our public demos.

REF2021 – We offer a support package for our customers relating to the next REF.  The plugins which help underpin this support, i.e. REFCC and REF Support are released publically as we make changes to them.

Reporting – We are currently working on improvements allowing for more flexible and readable reporting in EPrints, primarily in the area of producing CSV reports.  This will likely result in a new public version of the Generic Reporting Framework, as well as a drop in update to the existing Multiline CSV export feature.

ORCID – We are currently working with contributors from the community to improve upon our recent ORCID integration work and are keen to expand this further.

What we are doing next?

EPrints 3.4.2, integrate the new default ingredients, so date picker and rich text are better supported by default configurations.

Add lower level support for annotations at a core level, so these can be used more effectively.

Investigate new workflow layouts, as more fields are added over time, especially in the publications case, the deposit workflow becomes more unwieldy.

Support multiple dates at core level, rather than via the DatesDatesDates plugin.

REF2021 – We will continue our support of REF activities in the EPrints context.

ORCID – There is interest in further work in this area, so we are very likely to expand upon the existing offerings.

ResourceSync & Preservation – We are investigating working with ResourceSync.  And are interested in furthering EPrints in a preservation/archival context.

GDPR – Work with the community to produce tools to help manage GDPR requests within EPrints.

Accessibility – We are currently working with Accessibility and User Experience experts to improve EPrints in these important areas.