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...
[Trackback] Matt Cockerill on a landmark in BioMedCentral¿s role in the DSpace community Open Repository – open source in action: – In late 2006 and early 2007, BioMed Central participated in an