Researcher Profiles

A DSpace Researcher Profile is a special Person Entity (item) that is linked with exactly one EPerson (DSpace account). This linked EPerson owns the profile (Person Item), including having WRITE permission on it. The link between the Person Item and the EPerson is managed in the dspace.object.owner metadata field. This field is configured to hold authority values and will contains the uuid of the EPerson that owns the profile.

Here a summary of the key concepts & requirements of the feature

• Profiles require Configurable Entities to be enabled, as every Researcher Profile is represented by a Person Entity
• Profiles can be linked to only one EPerson (user account). That EPerson has full rights to manage the profile, including whether the profile is publicly visible or private.
• Optionally, Profiles can be synchronized (or initially created) via ORCID Integration.

When the feature is enabled the user can create a researcher profile from his Profile (account page)

if a Person Item already exists in the system matching the account email address this Person Item is offered to the user

once that a profile has been created or claimed, the user can make it public (Anonymous READ) or private

By default, deletion of the researcher profile does NOT delete the corresponding Person Item. Instead, it just unlinks the Person Item from the EPerson account. This behavior can be changed as specified in the Advanced configuration section below.

Enable the feature

To enable the feature you need to set the following property (uncommenting it in the config/modules/researcher-profile.cfg  or adding it to the config/local.cfg )

researcher-profile.entity-type = Person

You can eventually specify a different Entity Type for the item that can be used as profile. This is an advanced setting, change it only if you know what are you doing and have implemented specific customisation

You need to enable also the EPerson authority for the dspace.object.owner (uncomment the following lines in the config/modules/authority.cfg)

# Configuration settings required for Researcher Profiles
# These settings ensure "dspace.object.owner" field are indexed by Authority Control
choices.plugin.dspace.object.owner = EPersonAuthority
choices.presentation.dspace.object.owner = suggest
authority.controlled.dspace.object.owner = true

Advanced configuration

You can configure some aspects of the Profile feature in the config/modules/researcher-profile.cfg 

Specifically, it is possible to force all the profile created via this feature to belong to a specific collection (default to the first Person collection where the user has permission) and set it as publicly visible (default, Anonymous READ) or not. Moreover, it is possible to decide if deleting the profile will imply also deletion of the Person Item or (default) only the unlink of the Person Item with the EPerson.

Troubleshooting

I cannot fid this feature

The feature needs to be enabled explicitly, please follow the instruction in the Enable the feature section above.

The users sees an error when they try to create their profile

The feature requires Person entity configured in the data model (see Configurable Entities) and the user must have permission to submit in at least one collection configured to accept Person entities. Please double check that the EPersonAuthority is bind to the dspace.object.owner  metadata, see the Enable the feature section above.