Content submitted to a repository may be restricted by laws, policies, or contractual obligations that require the submitter not to publish or enable public access to the content for a period of time. This period of time is the embargo period. Once that period has elapsed, the constraints of the embargo are withdrawn.
Our (Johns Hopkins) constraints allow for embargoed item metadata to be indexed and viewed, but representations of the item cannot be retrieved. Different collections, communities, or institutions may have different constraints or policies on what an embargo encompasses.
Some JHU Embargo Patch Documentation is available.
The embargo project is composed of three major chunks of code:
1) The embargo API
2) The DSpace embargo API implementation
3) Changes to DSpace itself to use the embargo API
The embargo API and DSpace embargo api impl is a Maven project housed at JHU DRCC. Changes to DSpace itself are maintained in a SVN development branch also housed at JHU.