Functions and services

Important developments have been made to the standard DSpace interface so as to guarantee an optimal and personalized repository interface, catering for the needs of the Institution’s researchers.

ORBi offers the following functions and services:

• web interface for the submission, the management and loading of documents by means of a personal workspace:
  • division of reference publications within ORBi in line with the particular stage of the depositing process (submissions in progress, submissions to be signed by all co-authors, etc.);
  • forms adapted to the different types and subtypes of document with the following options for the author:
    • to insert the bibliographic references of his/her publications;
    • to enrich the reference with all information judged to be useful (comments about the document and its use, mention of peer-reviewing, name of the research program, funder, research center...);
    • to deposit multiple documents associated with a single reference (e.g. a monograph cut into several chapters);
    • to deposit various versions of the publication (author's preprint, author's post-print, publisher's post-print), to attach files of varying formats (PDF, doc, XML...) and to manage the access rights for each file (  restricted access,   open access,   open access with embargo) ;
    • to add additional material (photos, graphics, raw data, PowerPoint presentations, data files...);
    • to suspend a submission at any time and resume and complete the process later;
    • to deposit and safeguard documents concerning individual agreements concluded with the publishers in terms of self-archiving;

• automatic tools for data recovery:
  • postings in the personal workspace of the depositor’s publications, for which he/she has the role of author, and which – in order to avoid duplication - are submitted to ORBi by another person responsible for the publication.
  • the authors' coordinates (family name, first name, e-mail, affiliation and identifier) on the basis of the available information in the ULg directory and - for people outside the ULg - coordinates gradually introduced into ORBi by the depositors. This identification of ULg authors on the basis of their identifier allows publications to be linked - in a unequivocal way - to a particular author, independent of possible problems of homonymy or problems particularly connected to the name of the spouse in case of married women;

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  • bibliographic data relative to the journals (full title, abbreviated title, ISSN, publisher, mention of peer reviewing, etc.) using as a starting point a database of approximately 38,000 titles compiled by the ORBi team. The depositor furthermore has the possibility to add a missing title or to correct or complete the information about a journal;

  • automatic gateway towards the SHERPA/RoMEO database which records the editorial policies in matters of auto-archiving;

  • dynamic lists of institutions, funders, research centers, etc.

• tools for categorization of publications:
  • by type and subtype of document;
  • by discipline and sub-discipline;
  • by target public;
• a deposit assistance tool:
  • contextual help to provide the depositor with support throughout the submission process. This support device can be deactivated by a simple click activated - deactivated ;
  • automatic data suggestion based on the first characters used (autocomplete), especially for journal titles;
  • making available a legal guide [French only], a submitter guide [French only, restricted access], a FAQ [French only] and a tool box [French only, restricted access] ;
• generation of automatic e-mail messages to authors (signature of the license, archiving confirmation, etc.);
• pre-importation into ORBi of around 20,000 references of ULg publications found in Web of Science, Medline or written by members of the target groups (see the pilot phase);
• reference import functions from international bibliographic databases (Medline, Web of Knowledge...) or from export files made with personal bibliography tools (EndNote, Reference Manager, ProCite);
• setting up of a process to designate a representative on the part of the author;
• system of reconstitution in order to recreate an author's version (author's post-print);
• allocation of a handle;
• interface language (French/ English);
• compliance with the OAI-PMH protocol, permitting harvesting of ORBi references on the OAI meta-search engines (OAIster, Scientific Commons, Google Scholar...) and interoperability with the European project DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research)
• referencing of ORBi in directories or general serach engines like Google, Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)...

• scanning through the archive’s content by discipline, author, title, year of publication and journal title;
• research module, with the possibilities of searching within the full text of the electronic version. The advanced search permits the carrying out of queries by means of various indexes (author, title, keyword, year of publication, funder, etc.), to combine various searches by means of Boolean operators "AND", "OR", "NOT" and to limit results thanks to the use of filters (document type, subject, peer reviewing, language, target public);
• explicit signposting of documents with regard to their accessibility status (  open access,   open access with embargo or   restricted access) and the degree of scientific ratification (peer-reviewed, yes or no);
• general statistics regarding the number of new references (growth of the directory), the number of views and downloads, a top 20 of the most downloaded references as well as detailed statistics for each archived item;
• generation of publications lists according to international bibliographic standards;
• request-a-print system for documents with  restricted access;
• classification of documents according to their target group (researchers, students, general public, etc.);
• link from the ULg directory towards the list of publications of each ULg author;
• posting in the homepage, as well as the pages of disciplines and sub-disciplines, of the last three added deposits;
• follow-up of deposits effected in ORBi by means of the RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication). The RSS thread can extend to the overall repository (commencing with the ORBi homepage) or a discipline or sub-discipline;
• choice of the interface language (French/ English);
• possibility to spring forward in the search thanks to the link resolver present on each reference page towards other resources (catalog Source, impact factor of the journal...);
• integration of ORBi into the ULg's SSO (Single-Sign-On) so as to allow access to the institutional tools (like MyULg) by a single identification.
• generation of publication lists through a widget enabling the inclusion of dynamical content in personal, services or faculties web pages;

Particular attention has been given to ensuring:

• compliance with W3C standards :
  • compatibility with XHTML 1.0;
  • compatibility with CSS 2.1 ;
• operational capability with a robust, secure and efficient application, thanks to the use of Java (server);
• improvement of the compatibility with various browsers thanks to the use of a Mootools javascript framework.

• adding bibliometric analysis tools such as CiteSeer;
• integration of an API (Application Programming Interface) into the submission procedure, aimed at the automatic recovery of information in relation to the policies of publishers in matters of Open Access via the site SHERPA/RoMEO. As far as contacts made by the researcher with publishers are concerned, the communication of the elements of editorial policies added in ORBi will be implemented at the start in SHERPA/RoMEO by ORBi management team. A common interface with the French-speaking universities will furthermore be envisaged;
• interfacing Penelope (students' administrative database) for the automatic recovery of data linked to theses (promoter/s, members of a thesis jury, degree...);
• recovery of BICTEL/e-ULg and BICTEL/e-FUSAGx data.