By common consensus, we made far more progress on multiple fronts in 2025 than we imagined possible back in January. It was a banner year and it’s pleasing to have an opportunity to catch our breath and look back at some of the highlights. So here are highlights of how RSpace evolved in 2025, with help and support from the ResearchSpace team, customers, partners, and the open-source community. Thanks to you all for making this happen!

Collaboration

Research Data Management and Open Science Community

We could not survive without the RDM and Open Science Community! We take inspiration from the community’s energy and enthusiasm and learn from its many members and their diverse interests. Our participation in events and organizations helps guide our ever- evolving thoughts on strategic direction and our product development roadmap. We find satisfaction in contributing presentations and participating in working groups. We were amazed to discover that in 2025 we participated in more than 30 in person events, an all-time high. Of particular note was the involvement in the RDA GORC and MaLDReTH Working Groups.

Partnerships

Our community involvement blends nicely into a wide range of partnerships. In 2025 we deepened relationships with, among others, the California Digital Library, Dataverse and DataCite, and customers including UCL, Harvard University and Leiden University. Our annual German RSpace user meeting, hosted by Bonn University, was a great success, and in November we held our first ever team meetup outside of Scotland. The Max Delbrück Centre for Molecular Medicine kindly hosted us at their Berlin facilities. This provided an invaluable opportunity to visit the MDC facilities and engage with core facilities and research groups using RSpace, and the team of data stewards which is coordinating adoption of RSpace at MDC. We came away with lots of good ideas and will be looking to arrange similar onsite visits with other customers in 2026 and beyond.

RSpace Open Source Community

The open-source community continued to take shape throughout 2025. We saw contributions from researchers and research software engineers extending RSpace to solve their own workflow challenges: improvements to the iRODS and Dataverse integrations, a Python automation package, an R package for exchanging data with RSpace from within an R environment, and experiments with voice assistants and AI interfaces. These contributions provide a glimpse of what becomes possible when researchers and tool developers can adapt research tools to their specific needs.

Many of these contributions were presented in our bi-monthly open-source office hours, which you can read about here. The first 2026 office hour is taking place February 11, 2026. Whether you're deploying RSpace, considering it for your institution, or working on integrations with other research solutions, we'd welcome your participation.

Product

Chemistry Goes Fully Open Source

In May, we transitioned RSpace's chemistry functionality entirely to open-source tools—moving from proprietary components to Ketcher, OpenBabel, and Indigo. This foundation enabled rapid development throughout the year: PubChem integration in July, stoichiometry tables in October. These features build toward chemistry workflows that connect sample management, experimental documentation, and domain repositories without requiring researchers to manually transfer data between systems. More chemistry updates are coming soon.

Persistent Identifiers in End-to-End Research Workflows

Our IGSN integration now supports a complete end-to-end sample workflow that maintains a digital thread from field collection through to published sample metadata. The RSpace-Fieldmark integration allows researchers to use pre-registered IGSN IDs in RSpace to document samples during fieldwork without internet access using Fieldmark, then sync everything to RSpace when connectivity returns. Combined with our work on IGSN ID implementation guides developed with DataCite, this demonstrates how persistent identifiers can be integrated into research workflows from the start rather than added as an afterthought.

We also began work on integrating RAiD (Research Activity Identifier) into RSpace, enabling researchers to connect their documentation to broader project contexts and funding information—work that will conclude in early 2026.

Connecting Planning to Execution

An extended DMPonline integration launched in February[VP1] , allowing users to import and use personal Data Management Plans from DMPonline. This builds on our existing DMPTool-RSpace-Dataverse workflow, demonstrating a key principle: data management planning works better when it's connected to research execution. When your DMP can link directly to the research outputs exported to a repository, reporting and compliance become part of the research process rather than additional administrative overhead. Further improvements to working with DMPs and support for more DMP tools are already on our 2026 roadmap.

Computational Workflows and Analysis

Working with the Galaxy Europe team at University of Freiburg, we developed a bidirectional connection between RSpace and Galaxy that removes the need for manual data transfer between experimental documentation and computational analysis. Researchers can now browse the RSpace Gallery to import data into Galaxy workflows or send computational results back to RSpace from Galaxy. Additionally, RSpace users can send data to Galaxy workflows as part of their research documentation workflow, without requiring manual file export and version tracking.

We also extended RSpace's Python client and added native Jupyter notebook synchronization, automatically version-tracking notebooks on each run and displaying them within RSpace's interface. Computational workflows are integral parts of research documentation—they should be as straightforward to capture as any other experimental record.

Platform Evolution

Beneath these integrations, we continued fundamental improvements to RSpace's foundation. We completed the TypeScript migration of our entire JavaScript codebase, redesigned the Gallery interface, improved WCAG accessibility compliance, and made progress toward a new unified interface with global navigation. This foundation work makes future development faster and more reliable.

These highlights represent key themes from 2025—the complete list of improvements spans inventory enhancements, API extensions, security updates, performance improvements, and dozens of refinements across the platform. For the full details, see our changelog.

Looking Ahead

We're looking forward to 2026 to continue connecting infrastructure, research tools, and workflows end-to-end with our partners and the RDM and open-source community. Here’s a teaser for some things to look out for:

• Support for additional kinds of PIDs, and enhanced incorporation of metadata into RSpace workflows
• Further support for chemistry, samples and export to domain repositories
• Tailoring of RSpace for deployment by core facilities
• Enhanced support for deployment of RSpace in HPC environments
• Integrations with additional tools, including DMP tools
• Language localisation of RSpace
• Active participation in community events, the RDA, and partner user group meetings

For what's coming up, you can sign up to the RSpace mailing list or watch for updates to our roadmap.

Wishing you a restful end of 2025, and we're looking forward to seeing you again in 2026!