The ARKs-in-the-Open (AITO) team made great strides in 2018 toward their goal to transition the ARK specification and registry from the California Digital Library to a community supported and managed activity.

Some highlights of the work so far this year:
• The project received expressions of interest from 27 organizations on 4 continents.
• The project team developed a project vision, resources and value statement, and roadmap.
• The AITO Advisory Group formed and meets monthly to move the project forward according to the roadmap.
• Work has begun to form working groups to focus on project sustainability, outreach, and technical development. This builds on results from the The ARK Identifier Summit and Experts Day at the National Library of France, March 21-22, 2018.
• Summit programme and videos recordings (in French)
• Experts Day minutes (in English)
• Project presentations at several international meetings: iPres, the Decentralized Web Summit, and Singapore PID Workshop.

For 2019, the team’s priorities include:
• Finalizing initial charters for each working group
• Appointing members to all three working groups
• Developing a financial and governance model

If you’d like to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in this project, please sign up for the ARK mailing list or visit ARKsInTheOpen.org.

The post ARKs in the Open: Project Update #8, 2018 Wrap-Up and Looking to 2019 appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Whoa, what a sprint  Last week we had a sprint for newcomers to the VIVO project.  We set a new record for participation in a sprint (21).  I want to thank all the newcomers from all over the world.  We had major efforts in internationalization, search technology, bug fixes, documentation, build process, user experience, and product evolution.  We had new teams with multiple participants join from George Washington University, Texas A&M, and Duke University.  And we had many “old hands” available to answer questions, and provide assistance.  The group worked on more than 50 tickets, closing 20.  And it was just a one week sprint!  We had a great closing session with many good ideas about how to improve development practices, provide assistance for new developers, and organize future sprints.  So many good ideas.  So much good work.  So good to meet and have a chance to work with so many talented good people!

RDA.  It was a busy RDA in Gaborone Botswana:

• VIVO was named in an RDA proposal for modeling attribution
• VIVO was recognized in work being done by the Provenance WG
• VIVO was discussed in the context of persistent identifiers for machines by the PIDINST WG
• I participated in the work of the Data Foundations and Terminology workgroup, and the FAIR sharing workgroup
• I was able to personally update many colleagues on the progress VIVO has made over the past year, including the organizers of the spring 2019 plenary in Philadelphia.  We have lots of VIVO folks in the Philadelphia area.  Perhaps we can plan a meet-up.

VIVO continues to gain mindshare on those working on metadata for research, particularly metadata for representing people and their scholarly works.

Congratulations to Barend Mons!  Dr. Professor Barend Mons of the University of Leiden, creator of the FAIR acronym, director of GoFAIR, past chair of the High Level Expert Group for the European Open Science Cloud and a former keynote at the second VIVO Conference (Washington DC, 2011) was elected president of Codata, the Committee on Data of the International Council for Science to serve a four year term.  It was a pleasure to catch up with Barend at RDA.  Congratulations Barend!

Ontology Interest Group  Interested in ontology?  We have a group for you!  Not sure what ontology is, or why it’s important?  Stop by and find out.  The Ontology Interest Group meets every other Thursday at 10 AM US Eastern time via Zoom.  The ontologists discuss the representation of scholarship as an ontology, study and incorporate the work of others, and create models and an ontology that can be used across systems and applications.  Developers stop by to consider how the ontology might be used in software.  The discussions are always open.  Everyone is welcome to attend.  Some of the issues that have been discussed recently include:

• Representation of identifiers, including ORCiD, DOI, and others
• What identifiers to include in VIVO
• How to manage ontological change
• Licenses for ontology
• Representation of translations, and multiple languages
• Representation of projects and the relationship of projects to grants
• Representation of works in the performing and visual arts
• What constitutes ontology and what constitutes annotation for the purpose of supporting applications
• Fundamental issues regarding the representation of scholarly works

From time to time, the ontologists will spin off a group to work on a particular problem.  And this may result in a proposed design for some extension or revision of the ontology.

If you are interested, please join the ontology channel on Slack, and the interest group meetings.

National Forum on Expert Finder Systems  A new conference is being organized for Feb 28 – March 1 in Orlando, Florida.  The National Forum on Expert Finder Systems is sponsored by Elsevier.  From their web site:

Expert finder systems (EFS) have been serving universities, businesses, and the research community for more than two decades. However, there are still no formal venues for EFS stakeholders to network, learn from each other, and help steer the future of this dynamic field

Many of the organizers have a background in the VIVO community.  Should be interesting.

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director

The post VIVO Updates for December 9, 2018 — sprint, RDA, Barend Mons, Ontology, expert finder systems appeared first on Duraspace.org.

On December 5th the DuraSpace Hot Topics Series, “The Revolution Will Be Open?” concluded with the fourth and final webinar in this series.  Andrew Smeall of Hindawi, Brian Hole of Ubiquity Press, and Anita Bandrowski of  SciCrunch presented, “How For-Profit Companies Can Be a Part of the Open Environment.”  In this one-hour webinar each presenter discussed their organizations’ roles in the world of open scholarly infrastructure and how their work can benefit the scholarly communication community while both keeping open the infrastructure that they provide and operating in a for-profit mode.

The webinar recording and presentation slides are available at https://duraspace.org/webinar/.

A special thanks to David Lewis and Michael Roy the curators of this series and to all of the webinar series presenters and participants.

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Message to DPN members from the DPN nodes

Yesterday the Digital Preservation Network (DPN) announced plans to cease operations. The individual nodes that collectively provided preservation services to DPN seek to reassure the DPN membership as well as the larger academic and digital preservation communities that we remain confident about the future of digital preservation.

We continue to support long-term distributed digital preservation. The rich array of collaborative, community-driven digital preservation services in higher education offers reliable benefits to the academic community, despite DPN’s departure. Several of the services represented by DPN nodes provided robust technical infrastructure to DPN depositors from strong organizational bases that serve other constituents as well. That strength is unshaken by this turn of events. In no way does DPN’s end obviate the need for continued redundant, resilient, diverse preservation services working together.

Consistent with the values we affirmed last year, in the document “Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values,” which we all signed, at the core of our digital preservation mission is the belief that “we can accomplish these goals better together rather than separately.” We are united in our dedication to continue exploring future collaborative opportunities. Our resolve and our resilience in pursuit of our common goals remains strong.

In the immediate future we will work together with DPN to assist its depositors during DPN’s shut down process. While we continue to identify next steps, we will be moving ahead from a collaborative position of strength. We are available to work with you to support current and future preservation needs in whatever way we can. You can expect further communication from the node where you deposited content very soon.

Signed (alphabetically),

Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust)
Chronopolis
DuraSpace
HathiTrust
Texas Digital Library (TDL)

The post The Digital Preservation Network (DPN) to Cease Operations appeared first on Duraspace.org.

DuraSpace and the University of Toronto Libraries in collaboration with Scholars Portal and COPPUL (Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries) are pleased to announce a new joint project “DuraCloud Canada: Linking Data Repositories to Preservation Storage” funded by CANARIE, a vital component of Canada’s digital infrastructure supporting research, education and innovation.

The purpose of the proposed project is to connect preservation storage services through a common deposit layer based on open source software from DuraSpace called DuraCloud to research data preservation in Canada.

DuraCloud is a package of software components — some server based and others web and desktop based — that provides brokering services for cloud-based storage as well as a set of deposit tools and APIs that standardize the way users interact with cloud storage providers.

These software components are made available under open source licenses by DuraSpace and have been used to set up national services such as DuraCloud in the US and DuraCloud Europe. Using the same model and a similar deployment approach, the project will create a service called DuraCloud Canada with the goal of connecting preservation storage services to data repositories and bridging the current gap that exists between both.

The proposed project will make DuraCloud available for research data preservation in Canada by contributing to the DuraCloud open source codebase in order to facilitate the integration of existing data repositories. In doing so, it will fulfill multiple goals relating to the preservation of research data in Canada. It will provide an
interoperability layer between different preservation storage providers, expose a relatively easy-to-use API that data repositories may use to integrate with preservation storage options, and expose the set of pre-existing integrations that are already part of the DuraCloud system.

Work on this project will begin in November of 2018 and continue into 2020. Initial work will make use of DuraCloud within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud environment by adding storage integrations to existing Canadian data repositories. Once these connectors are in place, development will continue with the goal of allowing the DuraCloud software to be run within the University of Toronto data center rather than in AWS.

About CANARIE

CANARIE strengthens Canadian leadership in science and technology by delivering digital infrastructure that supports world-class research and innovation.

CANARIE and its twelve provincial and territorial partners form Canada’s National Research and Education Network. This ultra-high-speed network connects Canada’s researchers, educators and innovators to each other and to global data, technology, and colleagues.

Beyond the network, CANARIE funds and promotes reusable research software tools and national research data management initiatives to accelerate discovery, provides identity management services to the academic community, and offers advanced networking and cloud resources to boost commercialization in Canada’s technology sector.

Established in 1993, CANARIE is a non-profit corporation, with the majority of its funding provided by the Government of Canada.

For more information, please visit: www.canarie.ca

About DuraSpace

DuraSpace as an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization provides leadership and innovation for open technologies that promote durable, persistent access to digital data. We collaborate with academic, scientific, cultural, technology, and research communities by supporting projects and advancing services to help ensure that current and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage. Our vision is expressed in our organizational byline, “Working together to provide enduring access to the world’s digital heritage.” DuraSpace is the organizational home of the DuraCloud open source software.

About The University of Toronto Libraries

The University of Toronto Libraries system is the largest academic library in Canada and is ranked sixth among peer institutions in North America. The system consists of 42 libraries located on three university campuses: St. George, Mississauga, and Scarborough. This array of college libraries, special collections, and specialized libraries and information centres supports the teaching and research requirements of over 280 graduate programs, more than 60 professional programs, and about 700 undergraduate degree programs. In addition to more than 15 million volumes in 341 languages, the library system currently provides access to millions of electronic resources in various forms and over 31,000 linear metres of archival material. More than 150,000 new print volumes are acquired each year. The Libraries’ data centre houses more than 500 servers with a storage capacity of 1.5 petabytes.

Scholars Portal was formed in 2002 as a service of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) with the University of Toronto as service provider. The Scholars Portal technological infrastructure preserves and provides access to information resources collected and shared by Ontario’s 21 university libraries. Through the Scholars Portal online services, Ontario’s university students, faculty and researchers have access to an extensive and varied collection of e-journals, e-books, social science data sets, geo reference data and geospatial sets. Scholars Portal continues to respond to the research needs of Ontario universities through the creation of innovative information services and by working to ensure access to and preservation of this wealth of information.

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Sprint this week!  VIVO will be holding a one week sprint to introduce new developers to the project.  The print will focus on maintenance tasks.  If you’d like to learn about VIVO, how it is developed, and pitch in, this is a great opportunity.  You will want to be on VIVO Slack if you are not already.  Details regarding the sprint are available here:  2018-12 Sprint

January Architectural Fly-in The VIVO Project is planning an invited architectural fly-in to develop architectural approaches to addressing the statement of direction for 2019. The fly-in will bring together technical leaders to create documents that can be used to organized development sprints moving us in our desired direction. The fly-in will meet at the University of Florida Academic Research Center in Lake Nona Florida, and will be facilitated by Andrew Woods. You can read more about the fly-in here 2019 Architectural Fly-in The results of the fly-in will help orient technical work for 2019.

David Wilcox joins Membership Task Force David Wilcox of Duraspace is joining the VIVO Membership Task Force. David is well known in the Fedora community as the Fedora project manager. David has significant experience building and maintaining Fedora project membership. The Membership Task Force looks forward to working with David over the course of the coming year in its efforts to strengthen and grow VIVO membership.

Please welcome David to the VIVO community!

Books for VIVO Each month, we consider a book of value to the VIVO community. This month the book is “Basic Formal Ontology” by Robert Arp, Barry Smith and Andrew Spear. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top level ontology that provides the framework for the VIVO ontology, and many other ontologies, particularly ontologies used in the natural sciences. BFO is rooted in the philosophical concept of realism. BFO tries to define things that exist in the natural world, and tries to avoid defining classes and properties of convenience. This approach leads naturally to creative tension with those who might take a more expedient approach — identifying elements that appear to have value and letting utility determine the value of the representation. Professor Barry Smith, the originator of BFO, has been called “the most famous philosopher in America.” His ideas can be controversial, but BFO forms the foundation for the Information Artifacts Ontology (also used by VIVO), the Gene Ontology, ontologies used in industry and government, and the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry ontologies. If you would like to know more about the foundational roots of the VIVO ontology, and of ontology in general, you can’t do better that Arp, Smith, and Spear. The VIVO ontology is mentioned in the book, as are many other ontologies based on BFO.

Robert Arp, Barry Smith, and Andrew D. Spear. 2015. Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology. The MIT Press. ISBN-13 9780262527811.

Open Repositories Call for Proposals Open  Open Repositories will be held in Hamburg Germany, June 10-13, 2019. The call for proposal is currently open and closes January 9, 2019. You can find the call for proposals here: https://or2019.blogs.uni-hamburg.de/cfp/

Giving a presentation or poster about VIVO?  Know of an event of interest to the VIVO community?  We’d love to hear from you!  Please add the event to Conferences Attended and to Attend

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director

The post VIVO Updates for December 2, 2018 — Sprint this week, January architecture fly-in, David Wilcox, Books for VIVO, Open Repository CFP appeared first on Duraspace.org.

Open access to scientific findings is essential. This conviction is shared by both the Executive Board of TU Berlin and the University Library. To this end, the Technische Universität Berlin approved an open access policy at the start of this year, thus lending its explicit support to its academics and researchers wishing to publish their papers as open access documents. Open access ensures that publications are freely accessible, while maintaining the highest academic standards. TU Berlin is also one of approximately 200 academic institutions in Germany actively engaged in the DEAL project, which seeks to prevent the big academic publishing houses from establishing a monopoly. In a further step, the TU Berlin University Library is now initiating the founding of a consortium for the development of the “DSpace” open source software. The consortium consists of 25 academic institutions.

“We wish to ensure the development of the ‘DSpace’ software through the consortium, while also helping to shape the strategic focus of this software,” says Jürgen Christof, executive director of the TU Berlin University Library. “DSpace” is the most used software for operating open access repositories. Such repositories serve to make publications, research data and documents available to everybody, free of charge and on a permanent basis. As such, “DSpace” is not only the software behind TU Berlin’s “DepositOnce“ repository, it also forms one of the technical bases for open access publishing in general.

“DSpace“ open source software

“DSpace” is supported by the US non-profit organization DuraSpace, under whose aegis the “DSpace” community is organized. The new “DSpace Konsortium Deutschland” raises funds for the development of the software, forwards the funds to DuraSpace and in return is given a say in the administration of the project. The founding of the new consortium in Germany makes the focus of the project much more international. Previously, 50 percent of “DSpace” members were from the USA. Currently 28 members are from the USA, 25 from Germany and 34 from the rest of the world – including Finland, the United Kingdom, Peru, Portugal and Switzerland. In addition to TU Berlin, the Berlin “DSpace” membership also includes FU Berlin, HU Berlin and the Medical Library of the Charité.

“The founding of the consortium is another important step for us towards achieving open access,” says Jürgen Christof. “It enables us to make a significant contribution to the financing and development of the open source community. This reflects the commitment to contribute actively to open source projects which the TU Berlin University Library made in its open access policy.”

The post “DSpace Konsortium Deutschland” Set Up to Develop Open Source Software appeared first on Duraspace.org.

DSPACE
From Salwa Ismail, DSpace Leadership Group Chair, Head of Library Information Technology (LIT)
Georgetown University Library

As a community-based open source project, the DSpace digital platform is guided by the project Steering and Leadership Groups, which represent the needs of more than 2,000 stakeholder institutions around the world who use DSpace. Last year, the Leadership Group was infused with energy as elections were held and a new membership model was chosen for governance. Twenty new members were elected to the Leadership Group, and priorities were set forth to align with existing work, and to lead DSpace into a brighter future with a refreshed roadmap.

There are many exciting developments planned for the release of DSpace 7, which is a complete overhaul of the current DSpace infrastructure. The new version is a significant break from past versions, in that it features a new user interface built on current technology and support for data entities in the data model (aligning with research information systems) to ensure that DSpace stays current and competitive with other repository solutions while being interoperable with existing research information systems.

The Leadership Group is developing plans to involve more community feedback, by creating working groups that have representation from the community as requirements for the projects are developed and implemented. Another important goal that the Leadership Group is excited to implement is to ensure a broader and more inclusive communication with and feedback from the larger DSpace community about these new features and developments, so the project governance can engage with DSpace members and non-members in the adoption of and migration to DSpace. The Leadership Group works closely with the Steering Group which is responsible for implementing these priorities and coordinating with the various Working Groups. The working groups are incubators for many features and improvements to DSpace, and one of our priorities as the DSpace Leadership Group for the year 2018-2019 is to continue that community engagement in the form of our working groups, which will help us ensure a robust platform and an engaged community.

DSpace as a platform benefits from the fact that the Leadership Group has international representation from South America and Europe that helps ensure a truly global and rich set of factors are encompassed to make DSpace a very competitive platform. GDPR compliance and integration with other platforms, applications, and guidelines such as ORCID, OpenAire, CRIS data model is a current priority. The Leadership Group meets monthly and the meeting notes and decisions are posted online for the community to access.

About the DSpace Leadership Group: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/DSpace+Leadership+Group

FEDORA
From Robin Ruggaber, Fedora Leadership Group Chair, Library CTO &. Senior Director IT, University of Virginia

Fedora has established itself as a mature, community-supported, open source project, with growing membership and active participation from a wide variety of stakeholders. The leadership group is aiming for steady growth and progress towards fulfilling key priorities, along with a renewed focus on the long-term vision and the roadmap for Fedora.

In 2019, the LG will focus initially on completion of a comprehensive roadmap which will support the completion of the Fedora API framework and tested implementations but will also chart the course for other aspects of the community of vital importance to the product. This work is essential to achieving objectives in communication, marketing, fundraising, and community expansion.

The roadmap is a critical foundation for prioritizing and aligning work across the community. Collaboration and participation in the communities that leverage Fedora generates valuable use cases necessary to evolve Fedora. A prime example is the current API framework affording flexible options for competing demands- high availability vs performance.

About the Fedora Leadership Group: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Roles+and+Responsibilities#RolesandResponsibilities-LeadershipGroup

VIVO
From Julia Trimmer, VIVO Leadership Group Chair, Manager of Faculty Data Systems and Analysis, Duke University

It’s a big year for VIVO! We welcome for two new members, SIGMA, an academic IT non-profit based in Barcelona, Spain, and Cineca, an Italian consortium of universities and the Italian Ministry of Education. Anna Guillaumet from SIGMA and Federico Ferrario from Cineca have joined other esteemed members on the VIVO Leadership Group, including three members of the DuraSpace Board of Directors.

Made up of new and seasoned VIVO community members, the Leadership Group meets every four weeks and provides strategic direction for the more operational Steering Group, which meets every two weeks. Both groups are critical to the success of VIVO.

This summer, we thanked Dean Krafft at Cornell for serving as the VIVO Leadership Group Chair for an incredible seven years. We crafted new terms for the Leadership and Steering Groups members, including the chair, that are much less heroic. We held elections for community and bronze members this summer and formed new meeting processes—resulting in somewhat re-tooled governance groups and policies for VIVO.

Our biggest priority this year is to engage our Leadership Group in committing development resources for sprints. With the help of Andrew Woods, we’ve identified development priorities for the year and we’re moving towards a sprint schedule that will map out this development work. Hopefully, this schedule will help VIVO members plan ahead to commit developer resources.

DuraSpace staff and other projects have provided tremendous help to VIVO this year for governance, technical leadership, membership guidance and all kinds of administrative and organizational support, and we’ll continue to lean on them in the coming months.

VIVO is lucky to have an incredible community of talented, committed users, developers, and supporters, and we’re hearing a lot of exciting ideas about new directions that VIVO might take. We’re looking forward to bringing that energy and innovation together to move VIVO forward in 2019 and beyond!

About the VIVO Leadership Group: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/VIVO/VIVO+Leadership+Group

The post Introducing Open Source Project Leadership and Priorities appeared first on Duraspace.org.

On November 20th Andrea Wuchner and Dirk Eisengräber-Pabst from Fraunhofer and Pascal-Nicolas Becker from The Library Code presented, “DSpace for Research Data Management: Fordatis – a DSpace Solution.”  During this one-hour webinar the presenters discussed the issues of customization and implementation of an open access research data repository drawing from their experiences.  The presentation highlighted their requirements and use cases, why they decided on DSpace, how they customized DSpace to meet their needs, the lessons they learned and their future plans.  

The presentation slides and webinar recording are available at https://duraspace.org/webinar/.

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From Daniel Bernstein, DuraSpace Technical Lead and Developer, on behalf of the Fedora Development Team

Based on testing feedback [1] from the most recent 5.0.0 release candidate, the following tickets have been addressed and incorporated into a new release candidate:

# fcrepo4
https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/FCREPO-2934 : UI: “View Versions” link gives 404 if no version is created yet for a resource
https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/FCREPO-2932: 406 returned when Accept-Datetime header is present when GETting/HEADing Memento
https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/FCREPO-2959: Update modeshape dependencies to use new fcrepo fork.
https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/FCREPO-2938: remove fedora:writable triple
https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/FCREPO-2960: version and build info are no longer appearing in the HTML UI
Please help with some simple testing of this release candidate:
1) Download the one-click-run [2]
2) Download the war file [2] to deploy into a servlet container

The planned release of 5.0.0 has now been extended one week to December 10, 2018. Please provide your feedback before then.

[1] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Release+Testing+-+5.0.0
[2] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/releases/tag/fcrepo-5.0.0-RC-2

The post AVAILABLE for testing: Fedora 5.0 Release Candidate 2 appeared first on Duraspace.org.

DuraSpace presents a Community Webinar, DSpace for Research Data Management: Fordatis – a DSpace Solution

On Tuesday, November 20, 2018 (10:00am ET/4:00p.m. CET convert to your timezone), join Andrea Wuchner and Dirk Eisengräber-Pabst of Fraunhofer, Europe’s largest application orientated research organization, when they present, “DSpace for Research Data Management: Fordatis – a DSpace Solution.”

The recent Open Data project “FORDATIS aims to establish a research data repository not only under the FAIR principles, but also that is well-connected to both the publication repository and internal data management systems.  In this webinar, “Fordatis – a DSpace Solution” the presenters will discuss the issues of customization and implementation of an open access research data repository drawing from their experiences.

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’s research activities are conducted by 72 institutes and research units spread  throughout Germany. As all 72 institutes have their own requirements, needs and they’re focused on different research activities, the challenge for the team working on the Fordatis project was to develop a solution that could collect different use cases, address the various needs and meet the diverse requirements.

The presentation will highlight their requirements and use cases, why they decided on DSpace, how they customized DSpace to meet their needs, the lessons they learned and future plans.  The one-hour webinar will conclude with a question answer session.

Space is limited and pre-registration is required.

Register today!

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DuraSpace recently announced the first Country-specific Webinar Series with support from Neki IT, a Brazilian Certified DSpace Contributor. In this series different Brazilian institutions present their experiences with DSpace. As a Country-specific series, the webinars will be offered in the Portuguese language.

This new initiative supported by DuraSpace in collaboration with community members is intended to support the Brazilian community in sharing know-how, best practices and use cases on how to implement DSpace to provide open access to many valuable cultural and scientific resources.

Additionally to better enable communications within the Brazilian DSpace community, there is now an official and dedicated WIKI pages for the Brazilian User Group and a Slack channel under the broader DSpace channel (more information here).

LUME
The second webinar in the series presented LUME, a digital repository of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul that allows access to digital collections of materials produced within the University. During the webinar the LUME’s team presented their experience with DSpace, addressing the features of the repository they use and the difficulties they encountered in implementation. A recording off this webinar will be made available.

IBICT
The third webinar will offer the IBICT (Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia) perspective on DSpace, presenting reasons why IBICT believes in DSpace as an important instrument for sharing knowledge about building digital repositories while also demonstrating the importance of Open Source tools that enable access to information. Please register here: https://goo.gl/forms/rT2Nc7qfSc8kQJGm1

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From Ann Beynon, Clarivate Analytics  

At the third VIVO workshop in Germany, held September 17-18, 2018 in Hanover, WWU Munster, one of the largest universities in Germany, presented on how they connect Converis to VIVO. Converis is a CRIS system provided by Clarivate Analytics used to assemble the complete professional profiles for a complete and up-to-date collection of all teaching, research, and service related activities.  By linking Converis to VIVO, organizations can curate and link together research information within Converis and showcase it for external stakeholders via VIVO.

Benjamin Gross, VIVO specialists at Clarivate Analytics, recently trained the Converis implementation staff in Karlsruhe, Germany on VIVO to enable them to build VIVO sites for Converis customers across the globe who want to take advantage of this combination of tools.

Clarivate Analytics is as Certified DuraSpace Partner for VIVO services, helping organizations to implement and customize their VIVO.

The post Converis and VIVO Working Together appeared first on Duraspace.org.

DuraSpace is pleased to announce Erin Tripp has been appointed the Executive Director of DuraSpace, effective November 1, 2018. Ms. Tripp has been serving as the Interim CEO for the organization since June 1, 2018.

As Executive Director, Ms. Tripp will focus on broadening engagement with the international user communities of DSpace, Fedora, VIVO, and DuraCloud. She will be working on growing and developing new strategic partnerships and improving the sustainability of DuraSpace’s products and services.

“DuraSpace is looking ahead to the future and we feel Erin is the right person to lead us there,” said Tyler Walters, Board President of DuraSpace. “The DuraSpace team and Board of Directors is enthusiastic about working with Erin and collaborating to strengthen the strategic direction for DuraSpace in our rapidly evolving landscape.”

Since joining DuraSpace in 2017 as the Business Development Manager, Ms. Tripp’s work to date has been focused on building granting opportunities, creating new models for supporting small or burgeoning open source projects, and  fostering collaboration with open source service providers.

“We have an incredible team of staff who will continue to deliver on our mission, engage our communities, and promote openness” Ms. Tripp said. “I’m looking forward to engaging with our members to meet the needs of today and tomorrow. We have so much to look forward to as a community.”

All members will have an opportunity to meet and talk with Ms. Tripp during virtual office hours on Wednesday, November 14 between 9 am and 4 pm EDT or at the upcoming CNI fall meeting in Washington, DC on December 10-11.  Please reach out to Ms. Tripp to say hello and book a time to talk by emailing her at etripp@duraspace.org.

The DuraSpace team and Board of Directors are grateful to our members for their continued support throughout this transition process. As a result of your ongoing interest, engagement and participation, DuraSpace is well-positioned to continue to serve our communities by providing leadership and innovation in the development and deployment of open technologies and managed services that promote enduring access to the world’s digital heritage.

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Statement of Product Direction for 2019 The VIVO Leadership Group has developed and adopted a Statement of Product Direction for VIVO product development for 2019 bit.ly/vivo-direction-2019. Bringing together the interests of those in product evolution, the committers group, the development community, ontologists, and the interests of our sites and members, the statement of direction lays out four broad directions for 2019. Over the course of the coming year, we will hear much more about developments in these areas. Some areas are ready for immediate work and advancement while others will take more planning and consideration. The statement of product direction is a giant step forward for the VIVO Project. For the first time, we have a consensus statement on the direction of product development for the coming year.

The Statement of Product Direction for 2019 bit.ly/vivo-direction-2019 will orient our development, grant, and event efforts, as well as shape work for architecture and development sprints.

Please review the statement and share your thoughts on the VIVO lists and Slack.

I hope you will be able to contribute to the work ahead.

Scholars at Cornell We received the following unfortunate news from Dean Krafft at Cornell University this week:

I regret to announce that due to university-level choices on supporting faculty profiles, the Cornell University Library will no longer be able to maintain the Scholars@Cornell web site beyond December 31, 2018. We still remain deeply interested in making use of semantic technologies to describe research, researchers, and scholarship. We plan to continue to be engaged with the VIVO community, and we look forward to continuing collaborations, new grant funding opportunities, and all efforts to provide open solutions for the improvement of scholarship and research.
Dean Krafft

We look forward to continued collaboration with the wonderful team at Cornell!

Smithsonian Profiles The Smithsonian Institution (https://www.si.edu/) has launched Smithsonian Profiles (https://profiles.si.edu/). You can read the press release here: Smithsonian Launches Profiles of Scholarly Experts – Smithsonian Libraries Unbound

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex.  From Wikipedia:

The Smithsonian Institution (/smɪθˈsoʊniən/ smith-SOH-nee-ən), established on August 10, 1846 “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge,” is a group of museums and research centers administered by the Government of the United States. The institution is named after its founding donor, British scientist James Smithson. Originally organized as the “United States National Museum,” that name ceased to exist as an administrative entity in 1967.

Welcome Smithsonian Institution!

Two more new sites evaluating VIVO But wait, there’s more! Two more sites have joined the VIVO community this week:

• Universidade Estadual de Goiás (http://bit.ly/2CJWVzc) in Goiás, Brazil has a new VIVO site in evaluation.
• AT CRIS Consulting & Implementation (http://bit.ly/2CLGfqY) in Karlsruhe, Germany is also evaluating VIVO.

Welcome!

Ontocale joins VIVO as a Service Provider Ontocale (http://ontocale.com), headquartered in Bucharest Romania, has joined VIVO as a service provider. Brian Lowe, founder of Ontocale, is also one of the originators of VIVO. Brian has deep knowledge of VIVO and the VIVO ontology. You can learn more about Ontocale and the Duraspace Service Provider program here: Ontocale Joins DuraSpace Service Provider (DSP) Program

Interested in becoming a VIVO Service Provider? Contact Erin Tripp at Duraspace. We are often asked if there are companies that help with VIVO work. Yes, there are. You can find VIVO Service Providers on our web site here: VIVO Service Providers

Trip reports from ISWC The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) bring together researchers, corporations, librarians, and many others interested in the development of the semantic web and related technologies. This year’s conference was held in Monterey, California. This week, I came across two very good trip reports regarding the conference. Paul Groth of the University of Southampton researches intelligent systems with a particular focus on the web and science applications. His report can be found here: http://bit.ly/2CKPKa2 Juan Sequeda, computer scientist, author, and founder of Capsenta posted his report here: http://bit.ly/2CJc1Vs Both are very interesting perspectives on incredible developments in knowledge graphs and information representation. ISWC 2019 – The 18th International Semantic Web Conference (https://iswc2019.semanticweb.org/)) will be in Auckland New Zealand, October 26-30, 2019.

Interest Groups VIVO has interest groups that meet regularly to discuss topics of common interest. The Development Interest Group meets each Tuesday at 11 AM US eastern time to plan sprint, review open issues and pull requests. The group is facilitated by Andrew Woods.

Apps and Tools, Community Engagement, and Implementation each are looking for new facilitators. Facilitators set and agenda, sent out meeting reminders, and host meetings on VIVO Zoom. It’s a great way to meet people in the community. Interested? Please send an email to Julia Trimmer or Mike Conlon. We’re happy to help you get started!

Go VIVO!

Mike

Mike Conlon
VIVO Project Director

The post VIVO Updates for November 7, 2018 — Product Direction, Cornell, Smithsonian, New Sites, Ontocale, ISWC, Interest Groups appeared first on Duraspace.org.

From Danny Bernstein, Technical Lead, DuraSpace

The Fedora 5.0.0 release candidate is available for testing. Pending any issues discovered in the testing of the release candidate, the 5.0.0 release is planned for Dec 3, 2018.

The primary features/updates found in this release include:

• Alignment with the Fedora API Specification 1.0 which includes the implementation of the following web standards:
—Memento (versioning)
—SOLID/WEB (web access control)
—Activity Streams (notifications)
• Modeshape is no longer used for versioning and access control
The following is a full list of JIRA tickets found in this release:
https://jira.duraspace.org/issues/?filter=14708

The latest and greatest documentation can be found here:
https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA5x

There are several ways you can test this release candidate:
1) Download the one-click-run [1]
2) Download the war file to deploy into a servlet container [1]
Please provide your feedback on the release testing page [2].

[1] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/releases/tag/fcrepo-5.0.0-RC-1
[2] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Release+Testing+-+5.0.0

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DuraSpace presents a Community Webinar, DSpace for Research Data Management: Fordatis – a DSpace Solution

On Tuesday, November 20, 2018 (10:00am ET/4:00p.m. CET convert to your timezone), join Andrea Wuchner and Dirk Eisengräber-Pabst of Fraunhofer, Europe’s largest application orientated research organization, when they present, “DSpace for Research Data Management: Fordatis – a DSpace Solution.”

The recent Open Data project “FORDATIS aims to establish a research data repository not only under the FAIR principles, but also that is well-connected to both the publication repository and internal data management systems.  In this webinar, “Fordatis – a DSpace Solution” the presenters will discuss the issues of customization and implementation of an open access research data repository drawing from their experiences.

The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’s research activities are conducted by 72 institutes and research units spread  throughout Germany. As all 72 institutes have their own requirements, needs and they’re focused on different research activities, the challenge for the team working on the Fordatis project was to develop a solution that could collect different use cases, address the various needs and meet the diverse requirements.

The presentation will highlight their requirements and use cases, why they decided on DSpace, how they customized DSpace to meet their needs, the lessons they learned and future plans.  The one-hour webinar will conclude with a question answer session.

Space is limited and pre-registration is required.

Register today!

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From Salwa Ismail, Chair of DSpace Leadership Group on behalf of the DSpace Leadership Group

Texas Digital Library has kindly offered to host the next DSpace North American User Group Meeting in Austin, TX. This is a great opportunity for the North American DSpace community to meet again after the successful event hosted at and by Georgetown University Library in Washington DC in August 2017. However, due to certain discriminatory laws in Texas, some U.S. states restrict travel to Texas. Hence, the DSpace Leadership Group, with the full support of TDL, has decided to reach out to the DSpace community to see if there were any other organizations who would be able to host the event.

The host institution is responsible for the logistics (rooms, schedule/agenda, etc.) and registration. They are also responsible for meals/snacks (if doable). Past events have kept registration very minimal at under $50 and have been around 1.5 days. While there is no preference for a date, it is preferred that the meeting is hosted during a time that does not overlap with another conference. If there is an interest from another institution, the hosts of the past events would be happy to answer any questions. Please note that while this is not a DuraSpace sponsored event, DuraSpace helps the event by promoting it and sending its staff to this event to attend/present the sessions.

In the event that we are unfortunately unable to garner interest from any other institution, the TDL consortium will proceed with hosting it and the event will be promoted with statements of inclusion that the university system currently uses for other events along with the DuraSpace Code of Conduct.

We look forward to hearing from the DSpace community.

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From Prof. Yannis Ioannidis, OpenAIRE A.M.K.E Interim Head

DuraSpace strategic partner OpenAIRE announced today the formation of its legal entity, OpenAIRE A.M.K.Ε., a non-profit partnership, to ensure a permanent presence and structure for a European-wide national policy and open scholarly communication infrastructure.

About OpenAIRE: OpenAIRE, funded by the EC since 2008, has led the shift to open scholarship in Europe and helped alignment with the rest of the world. An e-Infrastructure with a true EU footprint, OpenAIRE promotes open scholarship and improves the discoverability, accessibility, sharability, reusability, reproducibility and monitoring of data-driven research results, across scientific disciplines and thematic domains, cross-border in Europe and beyond.

A community-driven organization at heart, OpenAIRE accomplishes a participatory infrastructure via its established network of 34 National Open Access Desks (NOADs) in EU member states and associated countries, accompanied by a service-driven approach which aims to support, acelerate and monitor open science. Respecting and realizing the “no-one size-fits-all” of the diverse research community and cultural variety of Europe, OpenAIRE is an integral part and a leading force behind the developments of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

OpenAIRE democratizes the research life-cycle, by assisting the transition of how research is performed and knowledge is shared.

Structure: Following a hybrid model of member organization and member state representation, the OpenAIRE A.M.K.E. aims to become the foundation for national coordination on Open Science in Europe, achieving long-term sustainability and economies of scale.

Becoming a member: OpenAIRE A.M.K.E. sets off with its current base. To accomplish a truly open and participatory modus operandi, it is open for other organisations to join from February 2019 onwards. Members of the organization will apply their expertise in their national or thematic contexts to:

• Support of reproducible research with technical services
• Alignment of Open Science policies
• Support & Training for Open Science

Our members are expected to actively contribute to shaping the European open scholarly communication infrastructure, capitalizing on their collective experience in Open Science. In this new setting, we will continue and strengthen our efforts within the EOSC context to engage all EU and associated member states to commit to the alignment and implementation of Open Science and outreach to other organizations beyond the OpenAIRE project base.

OpenAIRE Organization
OpenAIRE has reached a milestone: for ten years the organization has spearheaded the principles of openness, and has emerged as a key player in the Open Science landscape in Europe with global ties. Open Science practices are gaining global momentum, and committed players are needed to support this shift. OpenAIRE as an organization from now on, will provide a permanent platform to support tomorrow’s research for Europe. The OpenAIRE organization can’t wait to make this work and to achieve this, the Open Science and research community is we actively invited to contribute.

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On October 24th SPARC’s Executive Director and Board Member of DuraSpace, Heather Joseph, presented a DuraSpace members-only webinar, “Securing Community-Controlled Infrastructure: SPARC’s plan of action.”

In a recently published article, “Securing community-controlled infrastructure,” Heather Joseph, SPARC Executive Director, begins to address a common concern that was raised by the Open community in late 2017: “Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures.” In this webinar, Heather shared SPARC’s efforts on their community-controlled infrastructure project that further explores this question.  Heather highlighted what lead to SPARC conducting a market analysis, which included both a financial analysis and an analysis of strategies of some of the key commercial  players in the infrastructure arena, and the implications of those strategies for our community.  DuraSpace members were the first to hear about the findings of this work and learn what the next steps are.

The recordings and presentation slides of both webinars are available at https://duraspace.org/webinar/.

This was the third webinar in our members-only Hot Topics webinar series, “The Revolution Will Be Open?” curated by David Lewis, Indiana University Purdue University Indiana, Dean Emeritus of the University Library and Michael Roy, Middlebury College, Dean of the Library. The recordings and presentation slides of the first two webinars in this series, “The 2.5% Commitment: Investing in Open” and “Beyond North America: Widening Access and Participation,” are available at https://duraspace.org/webinar/.

Our final webinar in this series, “How For-Profit Companies Can Be a Part of the Open Environment,” will be presented on December 5, 2018.  DuraSpace members will be invited to attend the webinar and participate live with the presenters.

Members of DuraSpace are among leaders of institutions from all over the world who share a belief that our digital scientific and cultural heritage should be preserved and made accessible for future generations. Members of DuraSpace have been invited to become part of a conversation that aims to begin an investigation into what it will take to sustain the emerging set of open technologies that underpin the open scholarly ecosystem we all depend on.

Our members are actively engaged in determining how to move forward towards a more open scholarly ecosystem. Attending Hot Topics webinars is one benefit that we offer our members to aid in collaborative consideration of common issues and potential solutions as an exclusive benefit of being a DuraSpace member.  Become a DuraSpace member today!

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