Over the last few years, bepress has been undertaking a large-scale improvement of our technology infrastructure. Joining Elsevier has enabled us to continue, expand, and in many instances, speed up this work through heavy investments in development. We will be taking advantage of new resources and expertise in order to build more robust implementations of planned features and add others that we had not previously been able to consider. Following, you’ll find a list of the work that is happening behind the scenes, in addition to how you can expect that work to improve your experience with our products:
- Cloud: We’ve moved the majority of our files to Amazon’s S3 cloud storage and will begin moving our codebase in the coming year. This work will result in more uptime, faster downloads and uploads, as well as a more secure storage for your files. Moving to Amazon will give us the expanded storage and flexibility our system needs to have in order to support hosted streaming media.
- Secure Sockets Layer (SSL): We recently completed engineering work to enable SSL on all our sites to meet web standards and make them more discoverable and secure. We have rolled out SSL to the majority of customers and should be done with implementation by later next month.
- Search: We are moving our search from SOLR to ElasticSearch, which will improve accuracy of results and enable us to include snippets and thumbnails in our search interface.
- Data Privacy: We are working on ways to ensure data privacy in our product suite and are planning to be compliant with the new EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requirements by the summer of 2018. Meeting these standards will allow us to provide privacy protection far in advance of most U.S. providers.
- Authentication and Entitlement: Joining Elsevier allows us to leverage its authentication and entitlement system. We are currently researching two areas: the ability to support Shibboleth authentication as well as building a more robust implementation of ORCID in Digital Commons.
Stay tuned to the blog for more information about new features and improvements throughout the year. For questions, contact our product team at product@bepress.com.
