Improved Handling of Assets with Many Authors

January 2026 Smart Harvesting

Research outputs – especially articles - can have many authors, in some cases even thousands of authors. Handling this number of authors can pose a challenge for the system and for administrators.

You can now choose from one of two policies for the handling of assets with many authors:

• Keep all authors – this is the default policy, and this is how the system behaves today. In this policy all the authors – affiliated or not – are kept in the asset.

• Keep affiliated authors – this is a new policy added now. In this policy only affiliated authors are kept in the asset. If chosen, you can define the following:

  •  Number of Authors Threshold – any asset with this or a higher number of authors will be considered an asset with many authors and the “Keep affiliated authors” policy will become active. The threshold must be below 500 authors.

  • Optionally always include the first 10 authors even if they are not affiliated. This allows you to support the common requirement for citations to include the first 10 authors.

  • Optionally add a group author to represent deleted authors and define the text for the group author. The default text is “et. al”.

System limits for handling assets with many authors were not changed and assets with more authors than the limit will be rejected. These are the limits:

• Smart Harvesting Framework jobs – 3000 authors

• Import profiles and SWORD – 800 authors

• Create Asset API – 100 authors

In addition, there is now an author limit for auto-population in mediated and researcher deposits, to avoid import failures. There is now a limit of 500 authors, and if the record has more authors the system will delete authors 501 and beyond. These authors will be deleted before author matching and may include affiliated authors. the group author option can be used to represent deleted authors.

The configuration for the handling of assets with many authors was added to Configuration > Repository > Asset Details > Handling of Assets with Many Authors. 

The following table illustrates what will happen with either policy being active for assets added via Smart Harvesting.

For more information about configuring handling of assets with many authors see: Configuring the Many Authors Handling Policy

Update Set of Researchers with data from ORCID

January 2026 Management

A new ad-hoc job “Update Set of Researchers with data from ORCID” enriches a Researcher’s Esploro record with unique identifiers from their ORCID profile. The job runs on a set of Researchers and can retrieve up to three identifiers - the Researcher ID, the Scopus ID and ISNI - if these identifiers are on the ORCID profile and not in Esploro. If an ID is in Esploro it will not be replaced. The job is available for Esploro customers who have ORCID membership. In February it will also be available for customers with an ORCID public API key. For more information about running the job see: Running Manual Jobs on Defined Sets

Move to DataCite version 4.6

January 2026 Management

We moved to DataCite Metadata Schema 4.6, bringing improved accuracy and richer metadata to research outputs. This update introduces a new contributor type - Translator - and two new relationship types — IsTranslationOf and HasTranslation — to better link original and translated works, replacing the previous mapping IsVersionOf / HasVersion. Finally, specific resource type mappings are now available for common scholarly outputs, including JournalArticle, Book, BookChapter, ConferencePaper, ConferenceProceeding, Dissertation, Preprint, and Report, which were previously mapped to the generic “Text” type. These changes ensure more precise metadata and improved interoperability across research systems. You can review your mappings in Configuration > Repository > Creator/Contributor Mapping and Configuration > Repository > Asset to Asset Relationship List to see if you want to update them considering the changes to DataCite.

New Metrics Endpoint for Esploro APIs

January 2026 APIs

We added a new Metrics API that allows you to add citation counts to research outputs. With this feature it is possible to use one of four different identifiers to identify the output record in Esploro  – DOI, Web of Science ID, Scopus ID or MMS_ID. and includes the source of the metrics and the total number of citations. Up to 100 entries can be loaded per call. Citation metrics help you track and showcase the impact of your research more accurately. For more information about the API and details about the input schema see the Developers Network.

Display Researcher Associations on their Profile

January 2026 Portal and Profiles

We added the ability to display a researcher’s associations — such as memberships — directly on their profile page. Researchers have full control over visibility of each association, and can show or hide individual entries. This ensures that profiles remain accurate and personalized, allowing researchers to highlight the connections most relevant to their professional identity while keeping others private. Associations have been added to the configuration table Configuration > Portal & Profiles > Researcher Profile Management –Profile Privacy Display Settings. If you want to include Associations on your Researcher Profiles, update the field to display Publicly. For more information see: Configuring Researcher Profiles.