Reimagining a trusted institutional repository: transforming EPFL’s Infoscience with DSpace-CRIS

As open research evolves, institutional repositories must adapt to meet new standards of interoperability, scalability, and usability. This presentation examines the transformation of Infoscience, EPFL’s institutional repository, following its comprehensive migration to DSpace-CRIS, an open-source Research Information Management System, marking 20 years of service. Infoscience has long been a trusted platform for open access, metadata management, and institutional reporting, central to EPFL’s research ecosystem. However, legacy limitations necessitated a shift to a modern, flexible, and community-driven solution. The migration to DSpace-CRIS, conducted in collaboration with 4Science, enhanced compliance with FAIR principles, improved integration with global academic platforms, and streamlined workflows for researchers. Key advancements include the adoption of an entity-relationship data model showcasing EPFL’s research activities—units, laboratories, researchers, and datasets—and significant improvements in metadata interoperability. Custom pipelines were developed for seamless data imports from platforms like Web of Science, Scopus, OpenAlex and Zenodo. This case study highlights challenges such as data transformations and scalability constraints and outlines strategies for overcoming them. By detailing lessons learned, it demonstrates how an infrastructure overhaul can reinvigorate an institutional repository, ensuring its pivotal role in monitoring and advancing open research in an ever-changing digital landscape.