Just a few days ago, a new version of InvenioRDM was released with a lot of new features. Many of the features and improvements aim at making the repository operators’ lives easier and enabling enhanced workflows. Still, some of the added niceties are directly available to TU Wien Research Data, opens an external URL in a new windowusers:
Searching for records by publication year
Did you know that you can search for records in our repository by publication date? No?
Well, you can actually use any of the metadata fields for search, but for many of the fields, this involves manually crafting queries that require knowledge of the metadata schema. The new version of InvenioRDM provides a quite intuitive UI for searching records by their publication date (as specified in the descriptive metadata). As a side effect, that also gives an insight into the repository’s growth over time.
Requesting to join a community
Do you own a community and are tired of searching for users in the system to invite to the community? Now the process can be reversed: users can request to join a community. This feature is controlled by a new setting in the “privileges” settings for each community. So if you prefer your community to be an invite-only club, you can disable it.
Replying to comments in requests
Next to these community membership requests, there are still plenty of other types of requests in the system. They typically involve some back-and-forth communication between the participants in the form of comments, before the request receiver decides on an action.
Sometimes these comment timelines can get a little messy, and references to previous comments can become less obvious. To help keep comment threads clearer and avoid some unnecessary miscommunication, users can now reply directly to specific comments.
Download individual files from uploaded ZIP archives
Probably the most exciting new feature of the release is the improved handling of uploaded ZIP files. In the file preview UI, you can now select individual files within the ZIP file to preview or download. This means that you no longer have to download the entire ZIP file if you’re only interested in one single file inside it. Just pick and download whatever file you’re interested in! This feature is not only available in the UI but also via the REST API. In the future, this may be extended to other archive (and archive-like) file formats.
More streamlined reusability checks
One of the services that we provide to our users is feedback on the reusability of the uploaded datasets. So far, most of the criteria have been evaluated manually by our review team for each dataset, but some simpler ones have already been checked by the system itself. In both cases, the feedback was typically provided as comments on the publication request; for the automatic checks, these comments were posted automatically. These auto-generated comments were mostly a stopgap solution that were not feasible for more complex checks due to the limited UX of comments.
The new release allows us to define automated checks that evaluate specific aspects of datasets. The feedback from all of these automatic checks will be made available in a separate section/tab on the request details page, along with descriptions of these checks and explanatory text. Some feedback linked to individual metadata fields can even be shown directly in the deposit form!
At the time of writing, we haven’t yet updated our existing checks to this new mechanism. However, we plan to do that very soon, and also further extend the suite of automatic checks. This way, we hope to both provide more immediate feedback to uploaders and also streamline the reviewing process for our team.
Download all files for a record
Last but not least, we have finally enabled the feature to download all files for a record as a single ZIP archive. This feature has been available in InvenioRDM for a while, but we hadn’t enabled it until recently due to limitations in our setup. With recent advancements in the general Python ecosystem and some rework of our setup, we are now ready to provide this service.
Source picture 1 and 2
Thorez, S. A. (2026). Direct Observations of Lacustrine Turbidity Currents Triggered by Delta-lip Failures - supporting data and scripts (Version 1.0.0) [Dataset]. TU Wien. https://doi.org/10.48436/vw255-te613, opens an external URL in a new window
Contact
TU Wien
Center for Research Data Management
research.data@tuwien.ac.at