InvenioRDM v12.0

2024-07-31

Long-term support (LTS) release

We're happy to announce the release of InvenioRDM v12.0, the new much anticipated long-term support release! Version 12 will be maintained until at least 6 months following the next long-term support release. This also means that in February 2025, we will retire v9.1, the previous LTS. Visit our maintenance policy page to learn more.

Try it

• Demo site

• Installation instructions

What's new?

A lot is new since the previous v11 release. This new version is brimming with new functionality and improvements. We highlight the big changes here and we end with a list of the miscellaneous other improvements.

Usage statistics compliant with MakeDataCount and COUNTER

A major new feature in this release is the integration of invenio-stats, a powerful and flexible extension for measuring usage statistics of InvenioRDM records. Usage statistics are compliant with the MakeDataCount and COUNTER standards. This allows for better tracking and reporting of usage metrics for research data, helping to ensure transparency and accountability in research data management.

A wide variety of usage statistics are tracked over time and versions, including downloads, views, and data volume. You can also define your own custom metrics to track specific usage patterns or behaviors

Usage statistics are displayed in the record landing page and record search:

The landing page shows the unique views/downloads (it deduplicates events coming from the same source) by default. And only visits to the landing page count towards the record views.

For more details about usage statistics, consult the reference page

Record inclusion in multiple communities

A record can now belong to multiple communities.

You can include a record to multiple communities only after having published the record. Once a record has been included in a community, it becomes visible and editable by that community's curators. Including a record in multiple communities will let different curators change the files or metadata of the record.

Powerful and reliable record access

Giving and requesting access to records have seen a complete overhaul in this release. Record owners or curators can share them directly with other users or with groups, as well as control whether, who and how access can be demanded.

This provides flexible, yet reliable access control to the records of an instance and can even be done in bulk.

Notifications

A notification system has been introduced. Users can now receive email notifications depending on their preferences when they are involved in certain activities. For instance, inviting someone to a community will send an email to the invited party and send an email to the inviter when the invitee makes a decision.

Moderation of users and records

The administration panel now includes a "User management" section to suspend, block and delete users, as well as undo all those actions. Suspending a user temporarily prevents them from creating records, but lets them appeal their suspension. Blocked users cannot sign in anymore and deleted users are removed from the system.

Records can also be deleted (with a grace period for appeal or undoing) which empowers administrators to enforce institutional policies and fight spam. This leaves a tombstone page in place of the record landing page. See the Concept DOIs section below for a screenshot.

Associated JSON APIs (e.g. /api/domains) have been added. Bulk versions of these are in the works.

DOIs for concept records and no DOIs for restricted records

InvenioRDM now mints a concept DOI for every record by default, similar to what Zenodo has done for many years. This can be configured.

Along with this update, restricted records will now stop minting a DOI upon publication thus keeping private records truly private. And if the visibility of a record becomes restricted after being public, a tombstone will be shown:

Even better previewers

Audio and video previewers come by default. Beware that supporting these typically larger files may require some changes to an instance's upload limits and using delegated file serving.

Also, text (.txt) preview can be truncated after a specified number of bytes via the PREVIEWER_TXT_MAX_BYTES configuration variable. Text previewing has been made much more resilient thanks to that improvement, better encoding detection, and fault-tolerance to encoding misdetection.

External resources integration (e.g. GitHub)

The landing page for a record can now provide nicer visuals for configured related works. The configuration variable APP_RDM_RECORD_LANDING_PAGE_EXTERNAL_LINKS can be set to highlight some referred platforms:

Skippable community submission review

With InvenioRDM v12, you can change if a record review is always required for your community, or if curators, managers and owners can submit a record without the review process. In this case, a review will also be created, but it will be automatically accepted. Community managers or owners have the ability to enable or disable this feature for their communities through the "Curation policy" settings.

Banners

With the addition of invenio-banners, you can now easily add and manage important alerts and messages on your InvenioRDM instance, such as system maintenance notifications or announcements. The extension supports various types of banners, including fixed, floating, and dismissible banners. It also allows banners to be customized with different colors, icons, and animations.

Static pages - administration panel

Another notable addition is the integration of invenio-pages with the administration panel. It exposes a convenient UI to create and manage static pages. With invenio-pages, you can easily create custom pages for your application, such as "About Us", "Contact Us", or "Terms of Service" pages. They are also version-controlled, so page changes can be tracked and rolled back to previous versions if needed - this feature is only available to developers.

Static pages support custom CSS and Javascript. PAGES_ALLOWED_EXTRA_HTML_ATTRS and PAGES_ALLOWED_EXTRA_HTML_TAGS have been introduced to allow specific HTML attributes and tags in static pages in order to provide a workable security / usability trade-off.

Miscellaneous additions

Here is a quick summary of the myriad other improvements in this release:

• Enable/disable metadata-only records at the instance-level via the RDM_ALLOW_METADATA_ONLY_RECORDS configuration variable
• Enable/disable restricted records at the instance-level via the RDM_ALLOW_RESTRICTED_RECORDS configuration variable
• New export formats such as DACT-AP and GeoJSON
• Signposting has been integrated in a record's API responses and using the Accept: application/linkset+json header for a /api/records/<record_id> call returns the Linkset.
• Optional metadata fields that are easy to enable
• Improvements to the invenio rdm rebuild-all-indices command
• Mathematical formulas in a deposit can be rendered on the landing page via
  • THEME_MATHJAX_CDN = "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.1/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML" and
  • adding cdnjs.cloudflare.com to APP_DEFAULT_SECURE_HEADERS (updating content security policy headers)
• Possibility to add an entry to a controlled vocabulary via the CLI: invenio rdm-records add-to-fixture
• Addition of a proper handler for API permission errors that returns 403 when permission is denied
• Datastreams can sync funders and affiliations. ROR and OpenAIRE are supported.
• Fix for long affiliations' autocomplete crashing search
• Replacement of CKEditor with TinyMCE
• Transition modules from using Flask's deprecated before_first_request to using InvenioRDM's finalize_app entrypoint
• Backend IIIF tile generation can be set
• Great improvements in bulk serialization performance
• The communities REST endpoint accepts both UUID and slug in the URL
• Many new configuration variables (e.g., COMMUNITIES_SEARCH_SORT_BY_VERIFIED) to tune your instance
• ...and many more bug fixes!

Breaking changes

• See the Requirements section below for what underlying requirements are now necessary
• The react-invenio-deposit module has been moved to invenio-rdm-records
  • Any imports should be replaced: import { ... } from "react-invenio-deposit" -> import { ... } from "@js/invenio_rdm_records"
• Some Overridable React component ids may have changed. Verify that your overridden components load
• The /access/users API URL has been renamed to /access/grants to manage access grants
• Persistent identifiers have a new required is_enabled parameter, which enables better customization
• MarshmallowJSONSerializer, XMLSerializer, SerializerMixin have been removed from flask-resources
• Although not immediately breaking, the subject_nested facet is deprecated in favor of subject_combined to provide proper nested subject aggregation
• The Python module flask_babelex has been replaced by invenio_i18n
  • Any imports should be replaced: from flask_babelex import lazy_gettext as _ -> from invenio_i18n import lazy_gettext as _
• The cardinality of the Drafts and Records Metadata/REST API field parent.access.owned_by changed from (1-n) (an array of objects) to (1) (a single object).

Limitations and known issues

• Translations for v12 will be coming in v12.1 targeted for release in two months time from the release of v12.0
• Sharing a secret link to a restricted record in a restricted community does not provide access to the record yet. Work on this is tracked here.

Requirements

InvenioRDM v12 now supports:

• Python 3.9, 3.11 and 3.12
• Node.js 18+
• PostgreSQL 12+
• OpenSearch v2

Notably, older versions of Elasticsearch/Opensearch, PostgreSQL, and Node.js have been phased out.

Upgrading to v12.0

We support upgrading from v11 to v12. See the upgrade guide for how.

Questions?

If you have questions related to these release notes, don't hesitate to jump on Discord and ask us!

Credit

The development work of this impressive release wouldn't have been possible without the help of these great people:

• CERN: Alex, Anna, Antonio, Carlin, Fatimah, Javier, Jenny, Karolina, Lars, Manuel, Nicola, Pablo G., Pablo P., Pablo T., Yash, Zacharias
• Northwestern University: Guillaume
• TU Graz: Christoph, David, Mojib
• TU Wien: Max
• Uni Bamberg: Christina
• Uni Münster: Werner
• Front Matter: Martin
• KTH Royal Institute of Technology: Sam
• Caltech: Tom