Launch of SWORD Version 2

The second version of the SWORD resource deposit protocol, designed primarily to enable the deposit of scholarly works into content repositories, has now been released. Developed with funding from the JISC, the SWORD v2 project has built upon the successful and award winning SWORD deposit protocol to now support the full deposit lifecycle of deposit, update, and deletion of resources. In addition of the new technical standard, implementations for some of the most well-known repository platforms have been created, along with client toolkits and exemplar demonstrators.

Led by Richard Jones (Technical Lead) of Cottage Labs and Stuart Lewis (Community Manager), formerly of the University of Auckland, now of the University of Edinburgh along with oversight from Paul Walk from the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, the project was steered by an international technical advisory group of 36 experts in the areas of repositories, standards development, and scholarly content.

The development of the standard will allow a new breed of smart deposit scenarios and software products that are able to deposit content into one or more repositories, track the deposits over time, interact with them and update, or remove them. Before SWORDv2, deposit interoperability took the form of single deposits, coined as ‘fire and forget’. Once a deposit had been made, no further interaction was possible. SWORD v2 extends its support for the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) by adding support updates and deletions. These will enable new interoperable deposit management systems to be built that will work with any SWORD v2 compliant system.

Deposit use cases which are now possible include collaborative authoring, or getting more integrated with the publication workflow where multiple updates and versions of documents are required. Further details can be found at the SWORD website: http://swordapp.org/ or by emailing info@swordapp.org

(Text by Stuart Lewis & Richard Jones)