Reinventing the Wheel? - The Case for the Development of an alternative DSpace Submission Assistant for Psychological Science

DSpace comes with an elaborated, customizable interface for the submission of content out-of-the-box. For the reasons presented here, we decided against using it and are developing our own submission assistant for PsychArchives, a disciplinary repository for psychological science. The technical base is a PHP-based web application that communicates with DSpace via its REST-API. The main motivation for the development was ease of use for scientific users: The system should support entering metadata for Digital Research Objects (DRO) in such a way that the submitter has to enter as little information as possible, i.e. the assistant queries third-party systems to enrich the metadata of the uploaded objects in the background. This increases findability and reusability of the objects. Apart from metadata enrichment, the assistant allows uploading and describing different types of DROs, like statistical code, publication and primary data, together, without bundling in one item. The resulting separate items in DSpace are then connected with semantic relations creating an added value for the objects. By creating an interface that allows the user to achieve many of the goals of the FAIR principles with little effort, adoption of FAIR principles, DRO re-use and quality of repository metadata improve at the same time.