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Communities

Overview#

Communities in B2SHARE are organizational spaces that allow users and groups to publish, manage, and curate records together. They support a range of use cases, from collaborative research to institutional or thematic collections.

Each community can be set to either public (visible to all users) or restricted (visible only to its members). Regardless of visibility, communities can contain restricted records, and access to these records will follow the record’s own permissions.

Communities’ own records, which means they are displayed with the community’s branding and are searchable through the community’s landing page. Community ownership is also reflected in how publication workflows and permissions are handled.

A community can include multiple members, each with one of the following roles:

  • Member: Can view restricted records and publish in direct-publication communities.
  • Curator: Can review submissions and manage the curation process.
  • Manager: Can manage community members and invitations.
  • Admin: Can modify community settings such as name, logo, and policies.
  • Owner: Has full administrative access including deletion and renaming. Only b2share-admin user can create communities.
          ┌─
  Owner   │                                           - Create/delete community
          │                                           - Full administrative access
          │         ┌─
          │  Admin  │                                 - Manage settings, logo
          │         │                                 - Manage members/roles
          │         │         ┌─
          │         │ Manager │                       - Handle membership requests
          │         │         │                       - Invite members
          │         │         │         ┌─
          │         │         │ Curator │             - Review submissions
          │         │         │         │             - Moderate publication
          │         │         │         │         ┌─
          │         │         │         │  Member │   - View restricted records
          │         │         │         │         │   - Submit records
          └─        └─        └─        └─        └─

Communities can operate in either review-based or direct-publication mode. In review-based communities, submissions must be reviewed by curators before being published. In direct-publication communities, eligible users can publish directly without moderation.

Direct Publication Workflow#

In communities with the direct publication policy enabled:

  • Submissions do not require review.
  • All the members of the community can immediately publish to the community, indipendendly form the role.

Interface Examples#

Below there is a UI screenshot showing the effect of the direct publication policy: The paper airplane icon will indicate that the direct publication policy is enabled. Direct publication hint Role badge displayed on the community card and tooltip indicates immediate publication:

Review-Based Workflow#

In communities with review-based publication, all record submissions undergo a curation process:

  • The user submits a draft to the community.
  • A review request is created and visible to curators, managers, or owners.
  • Curators can preview the draft, discuss with the submitter, and either accept or decline it.
  • If accepted, the record is published and added to the community.
  • If declined, the draft remains unpublished.

The draft can move through various states: - Draft: Initial version, not yet submitted. - Draft with review: Draft prepared for submission. - In review: Under evaluation by community curators. - Review declined: Submission was rejected. - Review expired: No action taken in time. - Published: Accepted and finalized.

Official Scheme Source: https://inveniordm.docs.cern.ch/develop/img/review-states.svg

This process ensures that community standards are met before records become public. The review mechanism is powered by Invenio-Requests, enabling structured discussions and decision logging.

Community Schema Extensions#

EUDAT fosters the use community extensions for EUDAT metadata schemas. Community extensions provide scientific communities a way to define its own metadata schema fields on top of the default metadata schema defined by EUDAT Extended metadata schema. This way a community is able to enforce any researcher that publishes data under that community to include additional, community specific information about the data.

The schema extension support different type of metadata, that are expalined in details in the schema-extension documentation page

  Last update : 01.04.2026

Last review : 01.04.2026