Good things come to those who wait!

It is done – the 6.1 release of PubMan finally is deployed and the system is completely functional again.

The new version includes a quite extensive set of new features and improvements as well as a far reaching update of the underlying core service.

Just to get an idea of the extent of efforts that were connected with this release, it might be interesting to take a look at the sheer number of modifications: Altogether we managed to implement 25 new features as well as 36 improvements and by the way we were able to fix no fewer than 185 Bugs.

Now we would like to introduce some of the most important innovations:

* The new coreservice 1.2 brings along a better performance, especially of qa workspace, as well as a greater flexibility with regard to user privileges.

* One of the most interesting benefits of the new coreservice assumedly is the fact that institutes are able to create and edit CoNE entries by themselves. To learn more about the workflow of local CoNE management, please contact the pubman-support.

* So far, users could browse through PubMan content by organizational units. In addition, you now also have the possibility to browse by category (DDC as well as a customized MPI PKS classification), year and person.

* The advanced search now provides the option to search for ‘degree type’.

* There are some changes connected to the JusCMS project:

  • We have a list of new genre types that becomes available for submission. These include for example ‘Monograph’, ‘Handbook’, ‘Editorial’, ‘Commentary’, ‘Case Note’, ‘Festschrift’, ‘Newspaper Article’ or ‘Collected Edition’.
  • A new JUS citation style is available for export.
  • For journal articles, the appearance of the citation style is related to the given journal.
  • Title abbreviations for CoNE journals are available.

* We restructured the submission mask for authors and organizational units in order to make this section more convenient and user friendly. The authors and OUs now are summarized in separate lists. The single persons are assigned to its OUs via key numbers.

* The organizational units can be entered via autosuggest list.

* The copy-n-paste authors function has been revised and should now work more reliably.

* We also revised the citation manager in order to make it more stable and faster than before.

* In the import section, it is now possible to fetch full texts from BioMed Central.

* The publication language can be chosen via autosuggest list that includes the ISO 639-3 values.

* The language of the abstract can be entered in a separate field.

* PubMan will recognize and accept new mime types. The most significant are Office 2007 documents.

* We have added ‘plain html’ as a new export format. This will enable an easier and more comfortable re-use of exported data.

* The APA citation style again has been revised and we further improved the import/export of RIS, EndNote and eDoc.

* There is a new import/export functionality for the CoNE service in RDF format.

* Besides the DDC, we have a new subject classification that was implemented for the MPI PKS. It contains 14 basic classes.

* We now have a ‘Rollback Item Version’ functionality integrated into the log page of each item. It allows the user create a new version of an item out of any older version shown in the log.

*There is a new way to define the audience for restricted fulltexts. The user groups can be put together not only by the selection of organizational units, but also by choosing single users.

Known issues

Last but not least there are some points concerning the usage of PubMan, you should be aware of:

* Please notice that organizational units that are entered separately (not chosen via a CoNE-Person entry) need to be manually connected to a person via key number. Otherwise this OU will disappear in the next submission step.

* All items that are exported in the new JUS citation style but have a genre type that is not defined within the JusCMS project, will be exported as empty fields.

* The autosuggest list for the organizational unit field currently does not recognize the word ‘for’. This means, you will not be able to find your institute by typing ‘MPI for…’ (This does not apply for the German word ‘für’). To find the desired institute, please type in the name without ‘MPI for’.

Finally we would like to say a special thank you for your patience in context with the long delay of this release.

We are convinced that the substantial improvements and modifications included in the new system really were worth waiting.