This is a brief statement about what we are up to and where we are going, with respect to technical developments for our customer deployments.  It builds on, and should be read alongside our “Public Technical Roadmap”.

Updated October 2019 by Justin Bradley

What have we done recently?

Upgrading our EPrints 3.3 customers to 3.4, this includes moving to the latest version of 3.4.x.

This has allowed us to use some of our other latest developments, including

• Lists feature, allowing for collation and sharing of sets of resources. This replaces Shelves.
• User Profiles, a replacement for MePrints, available to all by default.
• Panel based layout for summary pages, user profiles and lists. Giving a cleaner and more flexible page layout.
• IRStats2.5, which can now detail document level downloads as well as total downloads.
• Visualisation tools for seeing your data in a new light.

Assisting our REF Support subscription members prepare their repositories for REF2021.

What are we doing currently?

Continuing to upgrade the remainder of our EPrints 3.3 customers to 3.4.

Additionally to enrich customer 3.4 repositories with our work on ORCID.

Supporting customer REF2021 activities!

What are we doing next?

Plan S – Once the actions relating to Plan S have been firmed up, we will be responding with EPrints tools to help your repository be compliant.

Arts content – We are looking to better support for visual media content, allowing for nicer previews and page layouts for images and video based content.  If your repository holds Arts content and you would like to help us improve how it is displayed then please get in touch.

Further work on IRStats2.5, so it can report on download of derived types (eg the viewing of a converted video, previews, or downscaled larger images.)  This is more relevant for EdShare and Data repositories.

And of course REF2021 activities.

What the future holds

Better preview and indexing for multipage documents.  This would allow search results to link to a specific page in a document, as well as updating the document preview system to allow better visualisation of spreadsheets, presentations etc.

CRIS-EPrints.  Extending the current system so research activities can be modelled from inception through to publication.  Model the relationships over time between funders, grants, researchers and their research. 

Want to suggest something for our roadmap?  Please get in touch.

See our current demos at http://demo.eprints-hosting.org/ or get in touch if you would like to know more.