DSpace, the software platform
which provides the foundation for BioMed Central’s Open Repository service, is proving
to be a great example of collaboration between the commercial and academic
sectors on an open source project.

In late 2006 and early 2007, BioMed Central participated in
an architectural
review of DSpace. The review brought together experts from major academic
institutional users of DSpace alongside technical specialists from commercial
organizations such as Google, HP and BioMed Central. This review group produced
a technical
roadmap that is now guiding the development of DSpace.

Last month, an important milestone was reached with the beta release of
version 1.4.2 of DSpace. This is the first official release of DSpace to
incorporate enhancements that have been contributed back as patches to the
DSpace project by BioMed Central.

Areas where BioMed Central has already contributed code back
to the DSpace community include:

• Oracle
  database integration
• Browse
  ordering
• Full
  text indexing
• OAI feeds

This is just the beginning – we look forward to sharing further
improvements to the core DSpace code in the future, in parallel with  the development of additional features that are
specific to Open Repository.

Google is also doing its part to help things along by
supporting several student
projects to enhance DSpace  as part
of its Summer of Code initiative.

Meanwhile, Open Repository itself continues to go from strength to strength, with several extremely high profile customers signing up in recent months – watch this space for more details soon...