Publications Router went live as an official Jisc service in August 2016. Since then, new institutions have started to take advantage of the service. On the Router’s web site there is a full list of institutions who are taking feeds into their live systems; many more are receiving test feeds or are at other stages in the pipeline.
Publications Router is the service that captures notifications about research articles from publishers and other providers and delivers them into institutions’ open repositories, matching them using the affiliations of the authors, for example.
Router continues to develop in service
Building on the valuable experience of these first few months of service, we’ve identified the next steps to extend the Router’s usefulness to institutions even further. Work on this is well underway. The Router currently delivers notifications to institutions using the Eprints repository system, and next year (see below) we’ll take further steps to make it easier for other systems to ingest its feeds.
At the moment, the Router populates key metadata fields within the core Eprints implementation without the need for any additional plug-in. By the start of the new year it will be able to populate further core fields – still without the need for any plug-in.
Once that underlying work has been done, a number of other additions will begin.
For example, we’ll make available a new Eprints importer plug-in that will populate the additional RIOXX fields, when our sources provide them, for repositories that have installed the existing RIOXX plug-in. This new Router RIOXX importer should be ready in the early part of 2017. (The Router will still work without it for the core fields, however, as at present.)
The underlying improvements will also enable the Router to be more robust in the way that it handles licensing and embargo details from those publishers that stipulate them. We continue to work with them on getting this information to the Router, to enable it to interpret and pass it on in a way that institutions’ systems can ingest and action directly. We want to achieve flexibility for as many publishers as possible without the need to customise each time a new publisher joins.
Support for CRISs and DSpace
The Router was designed to work with all of the common platforms and workflows that institutions use, so we’ve been talking to CRIS vendors, for example, about how best to get their systems on board.
To move that forward, we’re adding to the metadata fields that will be available via the Router’s existing API, and we’ll being issuing documentation for our updated version in the new year. This should help the CRIS vendors to develop the functionality on their platforms to capture the Router’s information in the ways that institutions need.
If your institution uses a CRIS, and if you’d like to be able to receive notifications from the Router into it (as many institutions have told us they do), do please make sure your CRIS vendor is aware that you have this need: when we speak to the vendors they tell us that their development schedules depend heavily on the demand from their client institutions. Institutions will be key in pushing this forward with their suppliers.
We will also work next year with institutions that wish to ingest straight into DSpace repositories, to test and support the interoperability of the Router’s existing SWORD2 feeds with that platform.
New publishers joining soon
Meanwhile, look out for further announcements of new publishers joining the service. We expect developments on that front very soon.
Find out more
If you’d like more information the Router service, do get in touch via pubrouter@jisc.ac.uk. Do also take a look through its web site.