We manged to create an integration profile for using SWORD to deposit assets from our CRIS to Esploro ( https://developers.exlibrisgroup.com/esploro/integrations/sword/ ).

We would like however to manipulate/normalize imported values we are importing, as we are used to do with Alma imports, where we can we create a Normalization Rule (NR), integrate it in a process and use it in an Import profile.

In Esploro we have NR, we have Processes, but still there is no way to integrate the process in the Sword integration profile / import process.

Please add the feature for adding a Normalization Process to the SWORD profile.
This Enhancement request was also proposed as idea: https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/929326-esploro/suggestions/48664172-esploro-sword-deposits-integrate-a-normaliza

Research outputs may go through several different iterations or versions over the course of their life cycle. To ensure transparency, reproducibility, and traceability of research, digital repositories must provide a reliable and consistent way to distinguish between different versions of the same work.

To this end, we recommend a system of version control be developed for Esploro that includes:

1. A dedicated field within the asset record for capturing version information. This field should display prominently in the asset record and PDF cover sheet and be queryable via Analytics.

2. The ability to locally configure version labels and associate them with select asset categories using a code table (similar to Asset File and Link Types).

3. The ability of researchers to deposit and link new versions of previously submitted assets.

4. Automatic grouping or FRBRization of different versions of the same asset with display preference for the latest version.

5. A prominently placed note within the display record notifying users when a version has been superseded and directing users to the latest version.

6. The ability to generate and share DOIs for a specific version of an asset or all versions (for example, see DOI versioning in Zenodo).

The primary goal of most institutional repositories is to provide free, public access to the research output of the institution. Although Esploro offers institutions the ability to grow their repository by harvesting publication metadata from external sources, the imported metadata is of limited value without full text or the location where the file is open access. We would like to see Esploro's smart harvesting capabilities extended by offering customers the option to match imported records with full text available from sources like Unpaywall. Using Unpaywall's API, it may be possible to identify Creative Commons licensed full text, import either the associated file or file location, and match them to records based on their DOI.

Researchers at our institution login to the Esploro research portal using SAML based single sign-on. Occasionally, however, affiliated users who have valid institutional credentials but do not have a researcher account will attempt to login. In such cases, the user is denied access but is given no information as to why. We would like the ability to create a custom user-friendly error message to address failed login attempts and direct these users to the appropriate support contact for further assistance.

When loading and maintaining researchers using the SIS loader if the researcher being added/updated contains an internal organization affiliation that is not configured in Esploro, that researcher will not load/update. An error is is created.

Instead of a creating an error for these cases, it would be helpful if the researcher could be assigned to a default internal organization that is configured by the site. A warning/exception would then be created in the SIS loader processing log stating the internal organization was not found, so the default internal organization was utilized instead.

Now that ORCID has added new asset types, Esploro should be able to map to them and cover a broader range of scholarly creations. Here are ORCID's new work types:

1. Design: Plans, drawing or set of drawings showing how something e.g. building, product is to be made and how it will work and look.

2. Image: A visual representation other than text, a still image.

3. Moving image: A moving display, either generated dynamically by a computer program or formed from a series of pre-recorded still images imparting an impression of motion when shown in succession.

4. Sound: A resource primarily intended to be heard. Examples include a music playback file format, an audio compact disc, and recorded speech or sounds.

5. Musical composition: Musical composition can refer to an original piece of music, the structure of a musical piece, or the process of creating a new piece of music.

6. Blog post: A piece of writing or other item of content published on a blog.

7. Conference presentation: A set of slides containing text, tables or figures, designed to communicate ideas or research results, for projection and viewing by an audience at a conference, symposium, seminar, lecture, workshop or other gatherings.

8. Conference proceedings: Conference proceedings is the official record of a conference meeting. It is a collection of documents which corresponds to the presentations given at the conference. It may include additional content.

9. Clinical study: A work that reports on the results of a research study to evaluate interventions or exposures on biomedical or health-related outcomes. The two main types of clinical studies are interventional studies (clinical trials) and observational studies. While most clinical studies concern humans, this publication type may be used for clinical veterinary articles meeting the requisites for humans.

10. Learning object: Teaching material. A resource requiring interaction from the user to be understood, executed, or experienced. Examples include forms on Web pages, applets, multimedia learning objects, chat services, or virtual reality environments.

11. Cartographic Material: Any material representing the whole or part of the earth or any celestial body at any scale. Cartographic materials include two- and three-dimensional maps and plans (including maps of imaginary places); aeronautical, navigational, and celestial charts; atlases; globes; block diagrams; sections; aerial photographs with a cartographic purpose; bird’s-eye views (map views), etc

12. Transcription: A written record of words spoken in court proceedings or in a speech, interview, broadcast, or sound recording.

13. Public Speech: (new work type; not mapped to COAR.) An oral presentation of information to the public. Including talks, interviews and podcasts.

See https://vocabularies.coar-repositories.org/resource_types/ for the full list

Introduce a moderation step or approval process before Activities and Projects are made public, similar to what is available for assets. This step will ensure content quality and accuracy, maintaining high standards for visibility and reducing the likelihood of errors or inappropriate content being published.

Integrate RAiD as a persistent identifier for research Projects and certain activities by allowing RAiDs to be minted similar to DOIs for assets. RAiD will align with the European Open Science Cloud infrastructure, enhancing the visibility and traceability of research activities. This integration will support more robust Project identification and linking across various platforms. Further information on RAiD can be found at https://raid.org/

We propose enabling researchers to edit the Engagement section of their profiles directly within the Esploro researcher profile. Currently, only administrators on the research hub have the ability to make these edits.

The current restriction requiring administrators to update the Engagement section of researcher profiles creates unnecessary delays and administrative burden. Researchers are unable to promptly update their engagement activities, which can lead to outdated or incomplete profiles.

Allowing researchers to directly edit the Engagement section of their profiles, with a moderation system in place to ensure the accuracy and appropriateness of the information added will enable researchers to keep their profiles up-to-date with their latest engagement activities, ensuring accurate and timely information.

We propose adding Data Management Plan (DMP) capabilities within the Esploro platform, as was originally planned in a previous early roadmap. This feature could be implemented as a separate entity or as a type of asset (with public DMPs kept separate from other assets in the profile display).

Currently, Esploro lacks integrated DMP capabilities, which are essential for researchers to effectively manage their research data throughout their projects. There are very few DMP tools available commercially. Introducing DMP capabilities within Esploro, allowing researchers to create, edit, and manage their DMPs directly within the platform, would be a huge benefit for institutions using Esploro.

Benefits:

• Streamlines data management by integrating DMP capabilities within Esploro.

• Ensures consistency and accuracy in data management plans.

• Provides researchers with a centralised platform for managing all aspects of their research data.

• Addresses the gap in available technologies for DMPs, offering a comprehensive solution within Esploro.

Features:

• The DMPs should have specific fields such as type of data collected, size of data, as well as storage, archival and publishing plans. Also include fields to track the changes in researcher involvement throughout the project lifecycle.

• DMPs should be displayed separately from other assets in the profile to maintain clarity.

• Researchers should be able to edit these fields as needed throughout the lifecycle of their project.

• Moderation guidelines should be established to ensure the accuracy and appropriateness of the information.

• Notifications should be sent to researchers when their DMPs are approved or require further modification or annual updates.

• An approval workflow, to reassign DMPs to other administrators within the institution, for ethics approval or storage approval, should be built into the moderation workflow.

The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) "Research Data Management Framework for Institutions" (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6392340) has a section on DMPs, including:

• DMPs have been published in Europe and America.

• Publishing DMPs may be stipulated as a requirement of funding.

• Publishing documented DMPs may help support knowledge exchange and understanding of what happened during the project, highlighting areas related to data context, licensing and IP, and management and handling of the data.

• Documenting RDM planning facilitates publication of a DMP, if required.

• Documenting RDM planning can also support the publishing of a dataset, so being able to integrate the two processes could be beneficial and support data publishing.

• Machine-actionable RDM should be considered — it may enhance the ability to integrate tools, while supporting automation and validation of DMPs.

We would like to use the Analytics/data warehouse of the Research Repository to consolidate the citations matrix about our organization publications. At present it is only possible to upload the citations counts from Web of Science and Scopus. We would like to upload citations data not just the counts, to the Research Repository from other sources such as CrossRef, Altmetrics and Overton, etc.. We have to manually do this step to report on the impact of our publications using spreadsheets. This enhancement will not only save us time but will enable us to use the citation data in the analytics reports available from Esploro.

In addition to approved assets, the Research Asset search retrieves assets with ‘Input status’ of Draft, Pending Approval, Returned, Submitted, and Under Review.

We would like to see items that are ‘Pending Author Matching’ also displayed in the overall Research Asset search.

We have the scenario quite often where a researcher requests we add an article to the repository but it may already be waiting for approval in our Smart Harvesting queue so does not come up as a duplicate record.

If there was one search box where all assets, even those not yet approved as a match, it would save us time and duplications.

The only required fields for Activities are a Name and a Category. We would like to be able to customise other required fields.

We find when researchers enter their own Activities via their profile, they'll often only fill out the first page of the Add Activity form. Since the only fields that display on this page are Activity Title, Activity Category, and Activity Type, we have a large number of Activities created with only this metadata entered.

If the date field could be made required, this would force the academics to go back in and edit the activity record to include the missing information.

Alternately... Implement a multi-page form to Add Activities similar to Adding Assets so that they step through the various fields.

When a researcher adds an activity via their profile it is not obvious where to enter the date. They need to know to click the pencil icon next to the title of the activity to add or edit the date. This is a problem for Researchers both when initially creating an Activity and if editing and existing Activity.

My suggestion is to move the editing of Activity dates out of the title section of the Activity and instead put it on the main Edit Activity form. See attached mockup.

When adding keywords to different entities (additional subjects in assets or grants, keywords in activities or projects, keywords on researcher profiles, etc), they need to be added or removed one at a time. This could be significantly improved in a number of ways.

• Provide the option to remove all keywords. The use-case for this would be when the incorrect keywords are imported (e.g. when the keywords from a Journal are prefilled instead of the keywords from the Article). Manually removing the keywords one by one is time consuming, this could be resolved by a ‘remove all keywords’ option.

• Provide the option to copy and paste a character separated list of keywords. The use-case for this would be when an asset isn’t found in the CDI but there are a list of keywords available to copy/paste. The keyword items have to be copy and pasted (or retyped) individually into the field. Autoparsing of a copy/pasted list would alleviate workload for staff and reduce copy/paste errors.

• Allow reordering of keywords. The use-case is for if there is a problem with one keyword, but it happens to be the first keyword, all other keywords need to be individually deleted and re-typed to get the correction fixed and all the keywords in the correct order.

We would like the option to set the default sort for collections to be by date. Relevance is not useful for collections because they are a preselected group of materials; there is not yet a search for which relevance applies. We often use collections to highlight new content so it would be helpful if we could have new content at the top of the results by default so users do not need to change the sort order.

See related Idea Exchange: https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/929326-esploro/suggestions/49331465-option-to-sort-collections-by-date

We would like a way to have a thumbnail/cover image associated with a metadata only item, particularly a book. We would want the cover to display in a collection like this https://iro.uiowa.edu/esploro/search/collections/Recent-Books-by-UI-Authors/Books?institution=01IOWA_INST to make it look more engaging. The image should as display on a profile, and it should be part of the import to Primo so that it displays there as well. The cover needs to be marked in some way as a cover image so it does not appear to be something with full text available; a cover image should NOT make the asset be flagged as OA. The link resolver should still work as for a metadata only item, and the item in Primo should still work as currently done for a metadata only item; in no case should the cover image be confused with full content availability. Assets with only a cover image should not be included in an output to sources expecting only full text (such as Google Scholar).

Note: we tested a cover image on book at the request of the author. The display was fine in Esploro and Primo BUT it behaved like something with full text posted and we all agreed that it was not an option with current functionality

The OpenURL enhancements in the March 2025 release partially address this issue, but the display is still problematic. Cover images shouldn't be treated like content files.

See also related ideas: https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/929326-esploro/suggestions/44019105-add-ability-to-control-thumbnail-image-and-alt-tex and https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/929326-esploro/suggestions/47744615-ability-to-display-thumbnail-images-of-outputs-whe

This item in Idea exchange https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/929326-esploro/suggestions/49461248-cover-images-for-metadata-only-items [attachment can also be viewed here]

Media Mentions are an excellent way to showcase the impact of our research, but we don’t have the staff time to add them to Esploro one by one. Since Researchers are the most likely people to know when their work has been mentioned in the media, we would like Researchers to be able to add their own Media Mentions via the Add Content menu and relate them to existing assets. It would be preferable to have institution-level settings for Media Mention submissions with options for auto-approval OR to require administrator review before they display outside the Profile.

Related to: https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/929326-esploro/suggestions/46330147-allow-researchers-to-add-their-own-media-mentions

Media Mentions are an excellent way to showcase the impact of our university’s research, but we haven’t made use of this functionality because we don’t have the staff time to find and enter this information one by one. But there are sources for this data, like Altmetric. Esploro already displays Altmetric scores, badges, and details at the asset level. Altmetric tracks each mention of a research output by news outlets (for example: https://dimensions.altmetric.com/details/49291201/news). If Altmetric news outlet mentions could be harvested by Esploro as Media Mentions, it would greatly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of this functionality. As with research assets, there would need to be workflows for reviewing and approving harvested Media Mentions before they are added to Profiles.

See related Idea Exchange: https://ideas.exlibrisgroup.com/forums/929326-esploro/suggestions/49508843-harvest-media-mentions-from-altmetric

Other than via approving deposited assets, we currently have no good way of knowing which of our researchers are actively updating their profiles. We recommend an Analytics report that would indicate the number of times researchers have viewed/edited their own profiles, as well as the most recent view/edit. This would help us identify researchers we could work with as ambassadors for the product as well as marketing to non-users.