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Welcome to Release 7.0, the next major release of the DSpace platform.  Any previous version of DSpace may be upgraded to DSpace 7 directly. For more information, please see Upgrading DSpace.

7.0 Release Notes

DSpace 7.0 is the largest release in the history of DSpace software.  While retaining the "out-of-the-box" aspects DSpace is known for, it represents a major evolution of the platform including:

• A completely new User Interface (demo site). This is the new Javascript-based frontend, built on Angular.io (with support for SEO provided by Angular Universal). This new interface is also customizable via HTML and CSS (Sass) and Bootstrap. For early theme building tips see User Interface Customization
• A completely new, fully featured REST API (demo site), provided via a single "server" webapp backend. This new backend is not only a REST API, but also still supports OAI-PMH, SWORD (v1 or v2) and RDF. Anything you can do from the User Interface is now also possible in our REST API. See REST API documentation for more details.
• A newly designed search box. Search from the header of any page (click the magnifying glass). The search results page now features automatic search highlight, expandable & searchable filters, and optional thumbnail-based results (click on the “grid” view).
• A new MyDSpace area to manage your submissions & reviews, MyDSpace includes a new drag & drop area to start a new submission, and easily search your workflow tasks or in progress submissions to find what you were working on. (Login, click on your user profile icon, click “MyDSpace”). Find workflow tasks to claim by selecting “All tasks” in the “Show” dropdown.
• A new configurable submission user interface, featuring a one-page, drag & drop submission form.  This form is completely configurable and can be prepopulated by dragging & dropping a metadata file (e.g. ArXiv, CSV/TSV, Endnote, PubMed, or RIS. etc) or by importing via external APIs (e.g ORCID, PubMed, Sherpa Journals or Sherpa Publishers, etc) (video). Local controlled vocabularies are also still supported (video). See Submission User Interface for more details.
• Dynamic user interface translations (Click the globe, and select a language).  Interested in adding more translations?  See DSpace 7 Translation - Internationalization (i18n) - Localization (l10n).
• A new Admin sidebar. Login as an Administrator, and an administrative sidebar appears. Features available include:
  • Quickly create or edit objects from anywhere in the system. Either browse to the object first, or search for it using the Admin sidebar.
  • Processes UI (video) allows Administrators to run backend scripts/processes while monitoring their progress & completion. (Login as an Admin, select "Processes" in sidebar)
  • Administrative Search (video) combines retrieval of withdrawn items and private items, together with a series of quick action buttons.
  • Administer Active Workflows (video) allows Administrators to see every submission that is currently in the workflow approval process. 
  • Bitstream Editing (video) has a drag-and-drop interface for re-ordering bitstreams and makes adding and editing bitstreams more intuitive.
  • Metadata Editing (video) introduces suggest-as-you-type for field name selection of new metadata.
  • Login As (Impersonate) another account allows Administrators to debug issues that a specific user is seeing, or do some work on behalf of that user.  (Login as an Admin, Click "Access Control" in sidebar, Click "People".  Search for the user account & edit it. Click the "Impersonate EPerson" button.  You will be authenticated as that user until you click "Stop Impersonating EPerson" in the upper right.)
• Improved GDPR alignment (video)
  • User Agreement required for all authenticated users to read and agree to. (Login for first time, and sample user agreement will display. After agreeing to it, it will not appear again.)
  • Cookie Preferences are now available for all users (anonymous or authenticated). A cookie preference popup appears when first accessing the site. Users are given information on what cookies added by DSpace, including a Privacy Statement which can be used to describe how their data is used.
  • User Accounts can be deleted even if they've submitted content in the past.
• Video/Image Content Streaming (Kindly donated by Zoltán Kanász-Nagy and Dániel Péter Sipos of Qulto):  When enabled, DSpace can now stream videos & view images full screen, using an embedded viewer. (See the "mediaViewer" settings in the environment.common.ts to enable.)
• Optional, new Configurable Entities feature. DSpace now supports “entities”, which are DSpace Items of a specific ‘type’ which may have relationships to other entities. These entity types and relationships are configurable, with two examples coming out-of-the-box: a set of Journal hierarchy entities (Journal, Volume, Issue, Publication) and a set of Research entities (Publication, Project, Person, OrgUnit). For more information see Configurable Entities.
• Support for OpenAIREv4 Guidelines for Literature Repositories in OAI-PMH (See the new “openaire4” context in OAI-PMH).
• Search Engine Optimization: Tested and approved by the Google Scholar team, DSpace still includes all the SEO features you require: a robots.txt, Sitemaps and Google Scholar "citation" tags.

• Basic Usage Statistics (video) are available for the entire site (See "Statistics" menu at top of homepage), or specific Communities, Collections or Items (Click on that same "Statistics" menu after browsing to a specific object

Additional major changes to be aware of in the 7.x platform (not an exhaustive list):

• XMLUI and JSPUI are no longer supported or distributed with DSpace. All users should immediately migrate to and utilize the new Angular User Interface.  There is no migration path from either the XMLUI or JSPUI to the new User interface.  However, the new user interface can be themed via HTML and CSS (SCSS).
  
• The old REST API ("rest" webapp from DSpace v4.x-6.x) is deprecated and will be removed in v8.x. The new REST API (provided in the "server" webapp) replaces all functionality available in the older REST API. If you have tools that rely on the old REST API, you can still (optionally) build & deploy it alongside the "server" webapp via the "-Pdspace-rest" Maven flag. See REST API v6 (deprecated)
• The Submission Form configuration has changed. The "item-submission.xml" file has changed its structure, and the "input-forms.xml" has been replaced by a "submission-forms.xml".  See Submission User Interface
• ElasticSearch Usage Statistics have been removed.  Please use SOLR Statistics or DSpace Google Analytics Statistics.
• The traditional, 3-step Workflow system has been removed in favor of the Configurable Workflow System. For most users, you should see no effect or difference.  The default setup for this Configurable Workflow System is identical to the traditional, 3-step workflow ("Approve/Reject", "Approve/Reject/Edit Metadata", "Edit Metadata")
• Apache Solr is no longer embedded within the DSpace installer.  Solr now MUST be installed as a separate dependency alongside the DSpace backend.  See Installing DSpace.

Additional Resources

• Video presentations / Workshops from OR2021 (June 2021) showing off many of the new features & configurations of DSpace 7: DSpace 7 at OR2021

7.0 Beta 5 Release Notes

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