What to do with harvester's petitions to modify core

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Dear fellows,

Recently we found a new brand harvester (under the umbrella of our national government) is asking every Spanish OJS to modify it’s code to fit the harvester’s needs.

They like to collect the bibliographic references of each article via OAI so they send a patch that modify the Dublin Core output to add this info as a new “relation” field.

So two questions rise to me here:

a) What are you all normally doing when a new harvester is asking for core modifications?
b) Do you know about any standardized proposal to include References in DC?

In the last tech.meeting, @asmecher suggested the best practice is a plugin. Of course, I full agree and I will encourage them to follow this way, but the real question is “what we all do if not”.

I mean, I’m kind of concerned about OJS been forked attending to harvester’s demands and making future upgrades more difficult.

Thanks for your time,
m.

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Hi all,

There are a few plugins that currently modify OJS’s OAI interface to suit regional initiatives: the Driver plugin, and the OpenAIRE plugin.

Just thinking about it, there are a few approaches that might decrease the chances that one group’s specific requirements won’t have adverse side-effects on others that use the OAI interface…

  • The plugin could check e.g. an IP address whitelist before introducing the altered behavior to OAI feeds;
  • The plugin could introduce a new metadata format rather than altering an existing one

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

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@marc, by “references”, is the harvester wanting citations? There is this old DC proposal:
http://dublincore.org/usage/meetings/2002/05/citdcsv.html

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