The first open-source release of DSpace-CRIS was based on DSpace 1.8.2. Current releases of DSpace-CRIS are based on current DSpace 7.6.1.

The latest release is DSpace-CRIS 7 2023.02.02 dated February, 9th 2024

This version, released on the February 9th 2024, provides minor improvements and bug fixing.

For previous DSpace versions the latest available tags are 5.11 and 6.4 both released on the August, 30th 2022 just after the release of the corresponding DSpace 6.4 and/or 5.11.  Please note that all the DSpace-CRIS versions based on DSpace versions older than 7.0 are End of Life (EOL) according to the corresponding DSpace announcement: Support for DSpace 5 and 6 is ending in 2023

Below there is a detailed release plan covering all the known features contributed by 4Science and other community members who support the enhancement of this open-source extension of DSpace (see: DSpace-CRIS Working Group). 

A visit to the community page maintained by DSpace-CRIS users is also recommended: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACECRIS/New+Features

New functionalities are only developed for DSpace-CRIS 7.


Versioning & support model

Starting from DSpace-CRIS 7 the project has adopted its own versioning model to assure accurate tagging and tracking of the changes across the different releases. Version numbers will use the following schema year.major.minor. The major number will reset to 01 each year, minor numbers start from 00, for example 2021.01.00, 2021.01.01, 2021.02.00, 2022.01.00, etc.

The latest version is actively maintained by 4Science and community members as volunteer work. Support for past versions will be based on availability of resources and funding from the community. Security fixes will be brought to the current version and the previous major if the current version is a new one (i.e. minor = 00). For example if version 2021.02.00 is the current one, security fixes will be released for both 2021 major 01 and 02, i.e. version 2021.01.01 and 2021.02.01 will be released. Once version 2021.02.01 will be out, security fixes will come as 2021.02.02.

DSpace-CRIS and DSpace releases are independent, the plain DSpace version used as basis for a DSpace-CRIS version will be noted in the changelog. But, whenever appropriate, it will be possible to release an official DSpace-CRIS version based on a DSpace unreleased version (as it was the case for the first DSpace-CRIS 7.0 release). In such situations, the DSpace-CRIS development team will have reviewed the known issues in DSpace and provided custom remediation, workarounds or alternative functionalities to support the relevant use cases. Some limitations can also be acceptable and just noted in the release notes as they may impact edge scenarios or a limited users' base.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Releases

The first production-ready DSpace-CRIS 7.0 was released on 2nd June 2021. The version supports the key use cases and the most demanded features of DSpace-CRIS according to the priorities defined by the community of users (DSpace-CRIS User Group).  The first version of DSpace-CRIS 7.0 addressed priorities 1 and 2 with contributions from supporting institutions (resource effort and/or funding) and volunteer work by 4Science (more than 3,000 hours in 2020 and 2021 on top of what 4Science provided for the plain DSpace 7). The original development plan is available here but it is not longer used to track progress and future plan that are instead described in the Product RoadMap and agreed within the DSpace-CRIS User Group.

Current development

With regard to the roadmaps of DSpace and DSpace-CRIS they are still separated due to the significant amount of extra functionalities of DSpace-CRIS that is not possible to quickly give back to plain DSpace yet. From time to time features are contributed back / ported to DSpace and the DSpace-CRIS community aims to keep the two projects as closer as possible eventually rejoining them. 

DSpace-CRIS is developed in the branches named dspace-cris-7 in the REST API, Angular and Rest contract repositories maintained by 4Science. The development of DSpace-CRIS closely follows the deploy of the official DSpace and new developments from the mainstream are generally merged in DSpace-CRIS within 1-2 weeks. The code is now very stable and there are many projects already running this codebase in production.

DSpace-CRIS 7 moves the CRIS objects to the DSpace items with the extended concept of Configurable Entities, maintaining the Authority Framework as an efficient, flexible, performant way to manage relations among objects, successfully used in hundreds of real installations around the world since more than 10 years.

DSpace-CRIS 7 has many additional features and tailored procedure that enhance the UX and are not available in DSpace 7, some key points are:

Please check the release notes of each DSpace-CRIS version and the technical documentation for more details.

A presentation of the newly released DSpace-CRIS was given at Open Repositories:

slides: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4923701. Video: https://youtu.be/8jgn0h38Zr8?t=3857 (starting at: 1h 03' 55").

Next releases

DSpace-CRIS 2023.02.03 is expected by spring of 2024 if no urgent issues are reported first.


DSpace-CRIS 2024.01.00 TBD

Unspecified versions (looking for funders / contributors)


2024

DSpace-CRIS 7 2023.02.02 February, 9th

This version, released on the 9th of February 2024, provides minor improvements and bug fixing.

Key Enhancements

Bug fixes

Based on DSpace tag 7.6.1 (backend) and 7.6.1 (front-end)

2023

DSpace-CRIS 7 2023.02.01 December, 27th

This version, released on the 27th December 2023, provides minor improvements and bug fixing.

Key Enhancements

Bug fixes

Based on DSpace tag 7.6.1 (backend) and 7.6.1 (front-end)


DSpace-CRIS 7 2023.02.00 November, 30th

This version, released on the 30th November 2023, provides alignment with DSpace 7.6.1 tag.

Upgrade instruction

The SOLR cores configuration MUST be updated with the last updates of this release.

A full SOLR reindex is reccomended, the search core could contains data that are inconsistent with the updated schema.xml version. You can rebuild the index via the dspace index-discovery script.

This could be a new script to be put in crontab

Key Enhancements

Major improvements areas / bug fixes

Based on DSpace tag 7.6.1 (backend) and 7.6.1 (front-end)


DSpace-CRIS 7 2023.01.01 October, 4th

Version released on 4th of October, provides minor changes and bug fixing

Key Enhancements

Major improvements areas / bug fixes

Based on DSpace tag 7.5 (backend) and 7.5 (front-end)

DSpace-CRIS 7 2023.01.00 June, 9th

Version released on 9th of june, provides alignment with DSpace 7.5 tag. See DSpace 7.5 release notes

Key Enhancements

Major improvements areas / bug fixes


DSpace-CRIS 7 2022.03.01 April, 21st

This version, released on the 21st April 2023, provides alignment with DSpace 7.4 tag. See DSpace 7.4 release notes.

Key Enhancements

Major improvements areas / bug fixes

Based on DSpace tag 7.4 (backend) and 7.4 (front-end)

2022

DSpace-CRIS 7 2022.03.00 December, 30th

This version, released on the 30th Dec 2022, provides alignment with DSpace 7.4 tag. See DSpace 7.4 release notes.

Key Enhancements

Major improvements areas / bug fixes


Based on DSpace tag 7.4 (backend) and 7.4 (front-end)

DSpace-CRIS 7 2022.02.00 September, 30th

This version, released on the 05th Oct 2022, provides alignment with DSpace 7.3 tag. See DSpace 7.3 release notes

Key Enhancements

Major improved areas/bug fixes
Several bug fixes and improvements have been introduced in the area of:

Based on DSpace tag 7.3 (backend) and 7.3 (front-end)

DSpace-CRIS 7 2022.01.02 August, 30th

This version, released on the 30th Aug 2022, is based on DSpace 7.2.1 tag. This version provide new features, improvements and fixes for several bugs.

Key Enhancements

Major improved areas/bug fixes
Several bug fixes and improvements have been introduced in the area of

Based on DSpace tag 7.2.1 (backend) and 7.2 - .1 not released for angular (front-end)


DSpace-CRIS 6.4.0 August, 30th

This is probably the last release of DSpace-CRIS based on DSpace 6. It is aligned with the official DSpace 6.4 tag


DSpace-CRIS 5.11.0 August, 30th

This is probably the last release of DSpace-CRIS based on DSpace 5. It is aligned with the official DSpace 5.11 tag


DSpace-CRIS 7 2022.01.01 April, 6th

This version, released on the 6th Apr 2022, is aligned with DSpace 7.2.1 tag, which includes a security update for CVE-2022-22965 (Spring4Shell critical vulnerability). This version includes updates in metrics presentation and graphical facets. Several bugs have been resolved.

Key Enhancements

Architecture

Data presentation

Data security

Other

Based on DSpace commits f863866 (backend) and e4f483c (front-end)

DSpace-CRIS 7 2022.01.00 March, 2nd 

This version, released on the 2nd Mar 2022, is aligned with DSpace 7.2 tag. New functionalities have been provided like new renderings, the possibility of setting a custom-url for an Item, new statistics sections. Several minor, not blocking, bugs have been resolved

Key Enhancements

Architecture

Data presentation

Data security

Other


2021

DSpace-CRIS 7 2021.03.00 December, 30th 

This version, released on the 30th Dec 2021, provides a new way of rendering an Item detail page, possibility of adding custom html fragments in home page, share functionality. Search and browsing performances have been improved, and further checks have been added to improve security and prevent the saving of Items in an invalid state when edited. Details of this release are reported below.

Key Enhancements
Architecture
Data presentation
Data security
Other


Release based on DSpace commits dbede2b (backend) and 7abdceb (front-end)


DSpace-CRIS 7 2021.02.02 December, 14th

The key changes in this version, released on the 14th Dec 2021, relate to alignment with DSpace 7.1.1

This is an updated version of the dspace-cris-2021.02.01, aligned with DSpace 7.1.1 release, which includes a security update for CVE-2021-44228 (log4j v2 critical vulnerability). It is fully compatible with the DSpace-CRIS 7 Frontend dspace-cris-2021.02.01 release.

We highly recommend ALL users of DSpace-CRIS 2021.01.x or 2021.02.x upgrade to cris-2021.02.02 to resolve CVE-2021-44228.

To fully protect your DSpace-CRIS 2021.x site from CVE-2021-44228, three steps are required:

  1. Upgrade your DSpace-CRIS backend to 2021.02.02 OR manually install #8065, rebuild and redeploy your DSpace-CRIS backend. Make sure to restart your Tomcat after the update.

  2. Upgrade to Apache Solr v8.11.1 (or above), OR ensure that -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true is specified in your SOLR_OPTS environment variable. For more information, see Solr™ Security News

  3. If you use the Handle.Net Registry Support in DSpace-CRIS 2021.x, make sure to restart your Handle Server (after performing step 1), so that it uses the new (secure) version of log4j as well.

For the technical documentation please refers to the dspace-cris 2021.02.01 release notes

DSpace-CRIS 7 2021.02.01 November, 11th

The key changes in this release relate to alignment with DSpace 7.1 tag. Some additional nice features have been also introduced, see below for details

Key Enhancements
Architecture
Data migration
Data presentation
Data quality & accuracy
Data security
Other

DSpace-CRIS 7 2021.02.00 October, 27th

This version is aligned with DSpace 7.0 tag. It improves the stability of the platform and provide a better support for users migrating from DSpace-CRIS 5. Some additional nice features have been also introduced, see below for details

Key Enhancements
Architecture
Data presentation
Interoperability
Data security


DSpace-CRIS 7 2021.01.01 August, 11th

This is a minor release, no breaking changes have been introduced. This version is aligned with DSpace 7.0 tag, which carries several fixes of bugs present in previous SNAPSHOT version.

Key Enhancements
Data collection
Architecture
Data presentation
Data quality & accuracy
Interoperability
Data security

based on DSpace version 7.0 tag Rest commit 3d9df39 and Angular commit  9fc7b57 

Documentation at https://github.com/4Science/DSpace/releases/download/dspace-cris-2021.01.01/dspace-cris7-2021_01_01-technical-documentation.pdf

DSpace-CRIS 7 2021.01.00 June, 2nd

This version fully supports all key use cases for a modern repository and RIMS / CRIS system. It is designed for new users, as migration from previous versions still requires some custom data extraction and transformation.

With DSpace-CRIS 7, 4Science is delighted to announce a number of key enhancements which improve the flexibility, integration, data quality and accuracy of DSpace-CRIS: 

These enhancements with DSpace-CRIS 7 build on the new DSpace 7 architecture, featuring a new Angular UI and a fully-featured REST API. 

Architecture
Authentication
Data collection
Data presentation
Profile management
Data quality & accuracy
Data security
Interoperability

based on DSpace 7.0-SNAPSHOT (REST commit ebd54ff, Angular commit f85a5e6)

Documentation at https://github.com/4Science/DSpace/releases/download/dspace-cris-2021.01.00/dspace-cris7-2021_01_00-technical-documentation.pdf


2020

We are ready to tag a new official DSpace-CRIS 5 and 6 releases after the cut of the official DSpace 6.4 and 5.11 versions, up to now we are still working on snapshot releases. The following features have been introduced:

Updates to the ORCID Integration

Submission

Other

2018/2019

DSpace-CRIS 5.10 (not official released but our recommended version: please use the snapshot - 5.9 skipped)

*** These features are already available on the 5_x_x maintenance branch ***

* these developments have been funded by OpenAIRE, as result of a public CFP in February 2018, see the announcement here 

We thank Technische Universität Hamburg , University of Bamberg, University College of Dublin, University of Coimbra and Avicenna-Research for their support.


DSpace-CRIS 6.3 (not official released, please use the snapshot)


2017

5.8 (released on September 15th, 2017) - see the full announcement here: https://www.4science.it/en/2017/09/14/dspace-cris-5-8-and-orcid-v2-api-support-release-announcement/


5.7 (released on August 8th, 2017) - see the full announcement here: https://www.4science.it/2017/08/09/dspace-cris-5-7-release-announcement/


6 RC / 5.7 RC (released on June 27th, 2017) - see the full announcement here: http://duraspace.org/articles/3236

  • The CORE Recommender Engine integration: Display documents that are semantically similar. Powered by CORE https://core.ac.uk/. You can take a look at our example here: https://dspace-cris.4science.it/handle/123456789/102
  • Authority Lookup based on Getty Vocabularies: For more information about Getty Vocabularies please check https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/index.html; DSpace-CRIS implementation involves both the "Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online" (https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/index.html) and "The Union List of Artist Names" (ULAN - https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/ulan/index.html)
  • Authority Lookup based on Viaf service: The VIAF® (Virtual International Authority File) combines multiple name authority files into a single OCLC-hosted name authority service. More info at https://viaf.org/
  • Signposting: dspace-cris now provides out-of-box support for the Author, Identifier, Publication Boundary patterns, http://signposting.org/
  • Import ORCiD publications via Submission Data Loader: During the submission process, users can choose an ORCiD and check which publication to import
  • Cookies Policy Popup: this feature allows easy compliance with the EU legislation on cookies
  • Other minor improvements: it's now possible to clean Solr statistics entries via WebUI; to upgrade Hibernate and Spring to the minor version; we have improved the automatic calculation of derived metrics and the creation of CRIS objects as part of the submission process
  • Other minor fixes: the out-of-box DSpace OAI Harvesting in DSpace-CRIS; the DSpace-CRIS SOAP web-services; the DSpace-CRIS Network when users try to show many graph

2016

5.6 (released on November 16th, 2016 - click here to browse the code on github) / include the release of DSpace-CKAN integration module

The release includes the security fixes already available in DSpace JSPUI 5.6, making it easier to upgrade from a recent DSpace version to DSpace-CRIS (no more need to run sql scripts manually) and brings a lot of new and exciting features:

As first implementation of the UI Extendibility we provide native support in DSpace-CRIS of the DSpace-CKAN Integration module (https://github.com/4Science/dspace-ckan). DSpace-CKAN allows an in-depth integration between DSpace and CKAN. Tabular data (CSV, XLS, etc.) are deposited in a CKAN instance through a curation task. The preview of the dataset content is enabled proxing in DSpace the CKAN Datastore API so to enforce the access condition defined in DSpace (Open Access, embargo, etc.). The dataset preview allows filtering, pagination and sorting, all the operation are performed on server side to save bandwidth overload. An example is visible here: https://dspace-cris.4science.it/handle/123456789/31

5.5 (released on March 27th, 2016 - click here to browse the code on github)


5.4 (released on February 15th, 2016 - click here to browse the code on github)

2015

5.3 (released on August 15th, 2015 - click here to browse the code on github)

5.2.1 (released on July 24th, 2015 - click here to browse the code on github)

5.2 (released on May 25th, 2015 - click here to browse the code on github)

4.3 (released on Apr 15th, 2015 - click here to browse the code on github)

4.2 (released on Mar 11th, 2015 - click here to browse the code on github)

2014

4.1.2 (released on Jul 12th, 2014 - click here to browse the code on github)

4.1.1 (released on Jun 28th, 2014 - click here to browse the code on github)

4.1.0 (released on Jun 13rd, 2014 - click here to browse the code on github)

2013

1.8.3-beta (released on Sep 6th, 2013 - click here to browse the code on github)

3.2.0-beta (first draft on Jul 31, 2013 - released on Aug 3rd, 2013 - click here to browse the code on github)

1.8.2.1-beta (released on July 24th, 2013 - click here to browse the code on github)

1.8.2.0-beta (released on June 24th, 2013 - click here to browse the code on github)

1.8.2.0-alpha1 (unreleased, available on github since Febrary 4th, 2013 )

2012

1.8.2.0-alpha (released on November 26th, 2012)