If you’ve ever reviewed a submission in CDS and ended up juggling email threads, chat messages, and half-remembered notes — this update is for you.
We’ve just rolled out improved commenting features in repository.cern (new CDS platform). That means discussions about submissions will be easier to navigate and use!
We also added 3D images previewer and few copy buttons to facilitate record links distribution – to share with your colleagues or your users.
You can read the full comments feature documentation here:
Disclaimer: the full documentation is still under construction 🏗️ and will be gradually updated
But below is the short version of what’s new — and why it should make your life easier.
What’s new?
Improved submission review comments
When a record is submitted for review, reviewers and submitters can now:
Reply to specific comments in threaded discussions
Quote another comment when responding
Share a direct link to a comment
Use simple formatting and LaTeX for equations
Temporarily keep draft comments auto-saved in the browser
Lock discussions when a review is finished
What does it mean in practice? No more copy-pasting comments back and forth. No more losing long responses because a browser tab was accidentally closed.
File previewer
From now on GLB files can be viewed directly on the record page:
3D event previewer
Version aware sharing
Would you like to share a link pointing always to the latest version of the record, but you don’t need a DOI? Or instead, do you really need a link to one of the previous versions? Use these new link 🔗 buttons:
Why we built this
CDS reviews are often collaborative: collaboration librarians, editors, conveners, authors — everyone has a say. Until now, most of that discussion happened outside the repository. That made it hard to track decisions and context over time.
With in-place commenting:
Feedback stays attached to the submission
Everyone sees the same discussion
It’s easier to follow what has been addressed and what hasn’t
Future curators can understand why a decision was made
Curators can lock the discussion once the review is complete, so the conversation stays as a record of the process.
This is a part of the process
We see this as the first step toward smoother community workflows in the CDS platform. As always, we’ll keep improving based on how people actually use the system.
If you run into issues or have ideas for improvements, let us know through the usual CDS support channels.
Thanks to everyone who tested early versions and provided feedback — it helped shape this release.
Our new CDS repository is now more FAIR and more integrated with CERN services. Read below how.
DOI – do I need one?
A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is like a permanent address for something on the internet, such as a research paper, article, or video. It’s a unique code that never changes, even if the location of the content moves to a new website.
Think of it like a tracking number for a package: no matter where the package goes, you can always find it using the number. Similarly, a DOI helps you find a document online, even if its web link breaks or changes.
When you click on it, it will always take you to the right place to access the content. This makes DOIs very useful for researchers, students, and anyone trying to find, share or cite information without worrying about broken links.
You do need, and you should prefer a DOI instead of other IDs, if:
the page of your document is public (the file might be restricted)
you want to keep permanent access to your article/paper/resource
you want any other researcher to be able to make references to your content (citations)
you want to share the content with the research community without worries about broken links
You do not need a DOI if:
your document is internal, fully restricted to to your collaboration
you do not need anyone to be able to cite your work/document
your document does not have research related nature
Choose your DOI option
Latest CDS upgrade, we introduced optional DOIs. When you are uploading a document, you can choose to:
Input an external DOI (for example, already provided by Zenodo.org, ArXiV.org or by a journal).
Obtain a new DOI, registered by CDS.
Avoid the creation of any DOI.
DOI selection optionsObtaining a DOI
When you choose to obtain a DOI from CDS, all the information associated with your record, except the file content, will be registered with DataCite.org. This includes metadata such as the title, authors, and other details, which may be accessed and harvested by third-party services.
Find my colleagues
Since we are on the subject of submitting the content to https://repository.cern (aka CDS), how about providing the most accurate metadata possible, without hustle?
You can now easily find all of your CERN colleagues and external researchers with ORCiD profile when listing them as authors or contributors to your work.
But wait, what is ORCiD?
An ORCiD (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is like a unique ID card for researchers (similar to DOI for research resources). It’s a special number that helps identify scientists, academics, and other contributors to research, so their work can always be linked back to them, no matter where it’s published.
Think of it like a social security number, but for researchers—it’s unique to each person and stays with them throughout their career. This is especially useful because many researchers might have similar names, or their names might appear differently in different publications.
For example: An ORCID might look like this: 0000-0001-2345-6789
With this number, all of a researcher’s work—papers, data, and other contributions—can be easily found and correctly attributed to them. It helps avoid confusion and makes it simple to track their achievements over time.
Creators and contributors
We have automated the import of the ORCID database, which, at the time of writing, contains over 21 million ORCID records, and the import of CERN users with an account.
Where can you add your colleagues to attribute for their contributions? There are dedicated fields in the deposit form:
Creators fieldContributors field
In the latest CDS platform upgrade, we improved the search capabilities and display of the autocompletion widget. You can now find your colleagues easier and add them even faster.
Preview of authors search
We highly recommend creating your own ORCID profile using this link. It is a must-have for any researcher!
Once you obtain and ORCID, you should connect it with your CERN Profile, using the Users Portal, as shown:
Finding affiliations
It is in a researcher’s best interest to provide the all possible metadata describing their research – more information they provide, higher the chance for other researchers to find about it.
Information about the researchers’ affiliations might be particularly important for highlighting the relationship with the organization which funded the research. Therefore, providing the up-to-date information about your affiliation will work well.
In CDS, we usually prefill that field for you, but our sources might not have the latest data, so you are able to fill the affiliations manually if needed. How? By using ROR identifiers (yes, yet another identifier!) or simply searching for the organization’s name.
A ROR identifier (Research Organization Registry identifier) is a unique, permanent ID used to identify research organizations worldwide. It ensures that institutions like universities, labs, and funding bodies are consistently and accurately recognized in research metadata, publications, and data repositories.
For example, many institutions have similar or changing names, which can create confusion. A ROR identifier solves this by providing a standardized, unchanging ID, like https://ror.org/01ggx4157 for CERN, which always points to the same organization.
ROR is open, free, and interoperable with other systems like DOIs (for publications) and ORCID (for researchers), helping improve the discoverability and tracking of research outputs. It’s a key tool for making research more connected and organized globally.
Affiliation field
Rich metadata
We made sure to put in place all these integrations with ORCiD, DOI, ROR and the CERN databases in order to make it easy for you to fill out the most metadata automatically (and quickly!). We strive for seamless user experience, and we really hope that all these features will make your upload easier and… more complete!
Find most viewed and downloaded
Curious to know what are the most viewed or most downloaded records? You can now easily find it out by sorting searching results.
🎄☃️❄️ Best wishes and a happy new year!
Image generated by ChatGPT with DALL·E.
The CDS team wishes you a joyful holiday season and a bright, successful start to the New Year!
… features and improvements! In the last quarter of 2021 we have been busy as bees, preparing to kick off the 2022 with some big news. Read further to know about the details!
CDS Videos – videos.cern.ch 🎬
Following our plan for the Q4, we have introduced significant changes to the CDS Videos platform. You might not see it at the first glance, but the platform evolved “under the hood”.
Transcoding infrastructure and video processing 📺
Video upload processing view
Transcoding is one of the steps of the video processing performed after you upload your video file to the platform. The transcoding software is responsible for creating several predefined subformats for your video. These subformats are later used to provide improved streaming experience for anyone who is watching your video (after it is published).
The transcoding software previously used by CDS Videos was causing us and CERN users many headaches. Thanks to the collaboration with the CERN Webcast team, who provided the new video transcoding tool OpenCast as a service, we have worked very hard to integrate it. This new software is expected to have increased reliability and incomparable better performance.
We also took a good look into the rest of video processing steps and fixed the commonly reported issues. The processing will be now faster and more consistent – no more videos processing indefinitely in your “Upload” interface! 🎉
User experience tweaks
Last but not least, we have made a few improvements in the user interface, having in mind all the feedback we received from you. A few highlights:
We have reworked some explanation text to improve general understanding.
Project editor’s permissions panel
The authors and e-groups autocomplete has been improved, giving you access to powerful and more reliable users search – as broad as the CERN Phonebook!
The user and e-groups videos restrictions is now case-insensitive.
No more weird errors when publishing videos!
CERN Library Catalogue – catalogue.library.cern 📚
And what about the other applications? We worked on them as well!
CERN Library Catalogue’s latest version offers improvements in the user interface as well as librarian’s interface. We follow the latest standards on application security and data privacy, and as a result, we now provide user’s accounts and data anonymization. You can check details of our privacy policy here.
To make things easier, the identifiers in the book’s details page are now clickable.
Book page with external provider hyperlinks
Are you doing a lot of research? Are you in a dire need of articles and periodicals? Check the remodeled “Where to find” section of the periodical page.
Periodical page featuring physical volumes
Librarians’ tools
Our team has also worked on improving the librarians’ catalogue management tools. For example:
Better bulk import of e-books
Better export of catalogue’s object to CSV files
Search tweaks – case-insensitive searches and other
Web infrastructure upgrade 💻
Among of the many changes and enhancements, we had to upgrade the underlying web infrastructure for both services CDS Videos and CERN Library Catalogue.
Both platforms are now hosted on OKD4 cluster provided by our colleagues from Web Infrastructure team. The migration is a good news not only for our users, but also for our developers: the change helps us decrease the effort we have to make to maintain and deploy new code.
CERN Document Server – cds.cern.ch 📄
The last, but not least – CDS. Our biggest and oldest application is under heavy assessment process – we are reviving its features and conducting interviews with the main users to understand how you are using our services, and how we can evolve in the future.
What’s next?
In the first quarter, the whole team is joining the effort of developing InvenioRDM, which will be the foundation of the future CDS.
