(apologies for cross-postings)

As part of the Open Repositories Conference currently being held at Atlanta’s Georgia Institute of Technology, Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft Research’s External Research group, is today announcing the public availability of downloads of a pair of tools, Zentity and the second version of the Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007, part of Microsoft Research’s ongoing efforts to enhance the scholarly-communication tools life cycle, as originally announced in 2008.  These free downloads are the latest in a regular drumbeat of releases from the Scholarly Communications team within Hey’s group.  

MSR’s Zentity is a research-output repository platform that provides the necessary building blocks, tools, and services for developers who are tasked with creating and maintaining an organization’s repository ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides an easy-to-install and maintain experience for those who want to quickly set up a research-output repository for their project, team, or organization. The platform is based on Microsoft’s technologies (SQL Server 2008 and .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1) hence taking advantage of their robustness, their quality support infrastructure, and the plethora of developer-focused tools and documentation. New applications on top of the platform can be developed using any .NET language and the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 environment. The platform focuses on the management of academic assets—such as people, books/papers, lectures, presentations, videos, workflows, datasets, and tags — as well as the semantic relationships between them. In this latest release, developers can declaratively (or at runtime) easily introduce their own asset and relationship types. Support for various formats and services such as full-text search, OAI-PMH, RSS and Atom Syndication, BibTeX import and export, SWORD, AtomPub, RDFS, and OAI-ORE are included as part of the distribution.

Dale Heenan, Web project manager at the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), has had an opportunity to implement an early version of Zentity, a research-output repository platform that enables researchers to store, archive, and preserve their work more efficiently, as a pilot to investigate ways to improve and extend the organization’s Social Sciences Repository.   “We have been impressed with Zentity’s flexibility and ease of use,” Heenan says. “Our pilot project has demonstrated that this innovative software could form the basis of a new ESRC Social Sciences Repository which would better meet the needs of the organization and our users. This is a promising solution from Microsoft, and we look forward to implementing Zentity version 1.0 over the coming months.”

Microsoft External Research strongly supports the process of research and its role in the innovation ecosystem, including developing and supporting efforts in open access, open tools, open technology, and interoperability.  We partner with universities, national libraries, publishers, and governmental organizations to help develop tools and services to evolve the scholarly information lifecycle.  These projects demonstrate our ongoing work towards producing next-generation documents that increase productivity and empower authors to increase the discoverability and appropriate re-use of their work.  More information on each of these tools can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/scholarlycomm.    

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