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Again, we welcome comments on this and will do our best to incorporate your suggestions.

Business requirements for item restrictions in the LCoNZ repositories

The four repositories in the LCoNZ IRR project (AUT University's Scholarly Commons, Otago University's OUR Archive, Unitec Institute of Technology's Research Bank, Waikato University's Research Commons) have been using extensive customisations to item restriction settings for over a year. The business requirements for restrictions differ slightly across these institutions and have evolved over time. The following is an attempt to summarise these requirements. The requirements in the bulleted list above all apply as well.

The following item states are currently possible:

1. Open: The item metadata and bitstreams are fully visible and accessible. The item is discoverable through search and browse, is exported via OAI-PMH etc.
2. Abstract-only: The item metadata is fully accessible. Any bitstreams are visible to and accessible for repository staff only. The item is discoverable through search (but only the metadata is indexed) and browse, is exported via OAI-PMH etc.
3. Dark: The item metadata and bitstreams are visible to and accessible for repository staff only. The item can be found via browse, but only by repository staff. The item is not discoverable through search, browse or any other means by the general public and is not exported via OAI-PMH etc.

All three states are permanent in the sense that state changes are done manually whenever the need arises (eg at an author's request).

In addition to any of these three states, items can be either fully or partially embargoed. Embargoes have a set expiry date; however, embargoes never lift automatically. Instead, a notification is sent to a specific repository staff group whenever an item embargo is about to expire; repository staff typically liaise with other university staff to ensure that the embargo can actually be lifted (eg in the case of theses, where embargoes may be extended in some cases). The embargo applies until it is manually lifted by repository staff, even after the expiry date. Fully embargoed items are treated like dark items until the embargo is lifted. Partially embargoed items are treated like abstract-only items until the embargo is lifted. When the embargo is lifted, the item state changes to Open, Abstract-only or Dark as appropriate (though typical combinations are Full embargo -> Open, Full embargo -> Abstract-only, Partial embargo -> Open). Changes to the underlying permanent state of an item take the embargo status into account -- eg when a dark item is made open while it is under a full embargo, in practise it will not become open until the embargo is lifted (but then it will become open rather than dark).

In all cases, only those bitstreams from given bundles are publicly visible; others (such as preservation copies or administrative evidence files) are accessible to repository staff only. Whenever a new bitstream is added to an item, the item's state determines the access settings for that bitstream. Standard DSpace metadata visibility restrictions as set up in dspace.cfg apply to Open and Abstract-only items.

Introduction of per-bitstream embargoes (where some bitstreams are publicly accessible and others are suppressed) would be of interest to some of the LCoNZ repositories. Currently, the only distinctions made are repository (admin) staff vs general public, but extension of these principles to allow special access to specific groups (such as on-campus users or the institution's staff and students) might be of interest in the future.

The strict requirement that embargoes must require manual action stems from the fact that embargoes so far are used only for theses. There are plans to apply partial embargoes (the most recent addition to the LCoNZ restrictions model) to journal articles, to comply with publisher mandates. In this case, automatic embargo lifts on expiry may be desirable.

To summarise, in the LCoNZ model, items can either be open or restricted. Restrictions can be partial or complete; they can also be permanent ("until further notice") or temporary (with a fixed expiry date). Temporary restrictions still require manual action to be lifted. Any of the permanent item states can apply after an embargo is lifted, but not all combinations of partial and temporary restrictions are used in practice.

Technical Requirements

Associated JIRA Tasks

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Embargo by Item only applies to Items that are Open Access, Visible to a smaller group or university of illimois users. This is because in those cases the item is in an archived state in the repository.

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