[EP-tech] Per user-group workflow and permissions

[mamalos at eng.auth.gr (George Mamalakis)]

Hello everybody!

In our previous repository (DSpace) there are many entries of 
faculty-members' publications that contain only some metadata, and no 
manuscript is uploaded. The library staff needs a process in EPrints 
that will allow faculty members to *easily* update these deposits with 
the related manuscripts, and optionally fill-in some metadata as well. 
After updating these deposits, editors will review them and make them 
publicly available if everything is OK. Next, the faculty-members will 
have to be able to make additional changes, if needed. Of course, 
faculty will have to be able to deposit new stuff as well.

My proposal to them was to create a "group of users" (for faculty 
members) using a custom role, where a simple workflow will be presented 
to users belonging to this group, by applying the appropriate 
conditionals in the eprints' workflow.

What worries me is that I am not sure how this will work with 
permissions. In DSpace, the records have been mainly uploaded by library 
staff members, so when migrating the deposits, I'm not sure that I'll be 
able to assign an EPrints user to each one of them. OK, I'm thinking of 
mapping a citation pattern for each EPrints user and maybe find each 
deposit's "owner" based on DSpace's citation field (if exists), but I'm 
not sure that the appropriate information will be available in DSpace. 
OK, I may have to search other resources as well (eg. Google scholar), 
but this complicates things even more. So if I am unable to find an 
appropriate user during migration, I'll have to come up with a more 
generic solution.

Such a solution would be to maybe add all these deposits in a specific 
collection (a custom field I added), in a different dataset than 
archive, where the specific user group will be able to somehow edit all 
eprints belonging to this collection, and once they deposit it, the 
reviewer will -somehow- declare the owner and publish it if everything 
is OK.

A combination of both alternatives would also probably fit the problem...

I am not sure if my alternatives are feasible in EPrints, I just hope to 
find a solution for this requirement, because it's very crucial.

Maybe a much easier solution is around and I'm not seeing it, so any 
help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks all in advance,

George.

-- 
George Mamalakis

IT and Security Officer,
Electrical and Computer Engineer (Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki),
PhD (Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki),
MSc (Imperial College of London)

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

phone number : +30 (2310) 994379