Update provided by Susanna Mornati, 4Science

4Science is an innovative company, working on IT systems that are on the Internet, 4Science carried on tirelessly during the pandemic and we thank the customers who continued to put their trust in us. It is only by providing services to institutions that we can continue to invest resources in ceaseless contributions to the DSpace community. More than a dozen new clients turned to 4Science’s services in 2020, added to the more than 50 clients we are already serving. We at 4Science are proud to have never failed to support the community as a major contributor to DSpace 7, with our utmost commitment.

DSpace-CRIS 7 and GLAM 7 are also well on their way, thanks to the contribution of our clients and especially the Technical University Hamburg (TUH), who is funding part of the development to accelerate progress. A great boost to the implementation of DSpace-CRIS 7 came from the PeruCRIS project, the Peruvian national platform for research, awarded to 4Science for $1.3 million US dollars (jointly with Semicrol that is in charge of Spanish localization and training). Check the roadmap for more.

But other challenges are rising. Security is more and more important for all organizations, and we, besides being a ISO 9001 certified company, are dedicating a lot of attention and resources to it. 4Science became a new Solution Provider of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), the world’s leading organization dedicated to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help build a secure cloud computing environment.

During 2020, 4Science made other important steps, becoming an ORCID Certified Service Provider and a DataCite Registered Service Provider. Persistent identifiers are taking a crucial role in the ecosystem of repositories. We were awarded a contract with the Queen’s and other Canadian universities, to develop a plugin for ORCID compliance and support for the OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repositories v4 in DSpace 5 & 6. See ORCID for DSpace.

4Science was also awarded funding from OpenAIRE for the project “Enrich local data via the OpenAIRE Graph”, providing two new services for DSpace and DSpace-CRIS: Data Correction and Publication Claim. Together with the compliance with the OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS manager, enabling DSpace-CRIS to expose research information to OpenAIRE and other OAI-PMH resources, these innovative projects contribute to make DSpace a major player in the ecosystem of research repositories.

A great chance to learn more about DSpace(-CRIS/GLAM) 7 will be at Open Repositories 2021, where 4Science is a main sponsor. Ten out of ten of our submitted proposals were accepted for presentations, workshops, posters. As usual, 4Science will be a major protagonist of the repository world scene. Open Repositories 2021 registration is now open.

About 4Science
4Science is a Certified DSpace Partner. These are organizations that have demonstrated expertise and a significant community effort to support DuraSpace open technologies through community leadership, in-kind contributions, and financial support.

4Science is a major contributor to DSpace, also serving in the Committer group and co-leading the DSpace 7 development. 4Science gives important contributions such as the integration of CKAN, Grobid, ResourceSync, and collaborates with the community in all areas of codebase, leading releases and providing support.

With DSpace-CRIS and DSpace-GLAM, 4Science proposes solutions for RIMS, RDM and the cultural heritage, and a crowdfunded model for add-on modules such as the IIIF Image Viewer and the Video/Audio Streaming.