DSpace repository features for the dissemination of medical research

December 3, 2020
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A closeup on a few selected features facilitating fast and effective dissemination of research.

The confrontation with epidemic outbreaks points out how crucial fast and seamless access to the latest medical findings is, in the race towards the discovery of vaccines and the adoption of best practices. Getting papers, presentations and datasets, preferably without embargo, uploaded in your repository is a first step. Here are a number of features you might be unaware of, that also help.

The @OSCHarvard is now fast-tracking the deposit of #COVID19 research into DASH, the @Harvard #openaccess repository.

We started two days ago with this paper by @mlipsitch, which has already received more than 10.5k downloads.https://t.co/JFseihEJtA

— Peter Suber (@petersuber) March 12, 2020

RSS feeds and email notifications for new submissions

Even if you are not a member of an institution or a registered user, many repositories offer RSS feeds that help you to stay up to date with the latest additions.

Usually you can find these RSS feeds linked from the homepage of the repository. However, if those generate too much noise for you, know that you can also subscribe to collection or community specific RSS feeds.

One example of a valuable DSpace repository resource where recent COVID-19 resources are being added, is WHO's IRIS repository.

Right from the homepage, you can find the site-wide RSS feed: https://apps.who.int/iris/feed/rss_2.0/site

However, let's say you only want the notifications for the Technical documents collection of the regional office for Africa, you can add https://apps.who.int/iris/feed/rss_2.0/10665/1639 to your RSS reader.

Repositories allowing external users to register for an account, like Lenus: The Irish Health Repository, allow you to subscribe to email alerts of new papers going into the collection. Usually, these emails go out once a day.

Discover related articles

Thanks to an integration with PubMed, Atmire's Open Repository installations can offer access to related content outside of the repository.

One example is the Open Access publication "An Advanced Human Intestinal Coculture Model Reveals Compartmentalized Host and Pathogen Strategies during Infection." from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research repository.

On the second half of the page, you can find a list of related articles from PubMed:

Submit content faster: repurpose metadata from other sources

There is an alternative for entering metadata by hand, field by field, which is both time intensive and error prone. Instead, you can start your submission with a lookup in an external metadata source, to copy over metadata for the publication you want to submit.

The screenshot below shows a list of search results on COVID-19, from PubMed, visualised in the Open Repository submission interface. From this window, you can easily select the metadata of the item you want to import into your repository:

Fast discovery in Google Scholar

Once your repository is fully discovered and indexed in Google Scholar, novel content can find its way to the pages of this scholarly giant faster than you may think. As an example, the item Laboratory testing for coronavirus disease 2019 (‎COVID-19)‎ in suspected human cases: interim guidance, 2 March 2020 became available on March 4th in the repository, and was already visible a couple days later in Google Scholar.

Contact us today

If you have medical or other collections that you wish to expose online through a DSpace repository, or if you have configuration issues with your current repository, get in touch today, so we can get your content disseminated as soon as possible.

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