University of St.Gallen and 4Science modernize research systems on AWS

The University of St.Gallen, one of Europe’s leading business universities, launched Alexandria as one of Switzerland’s first open-access institutional repos. The repo gives the university’s staff a public home for publications, project information, and researcher profiles. For nearly 2 decades, Alexandria ran on open source software EPrints. Over time, EPrints drifted toward the specific compliance requirements of the United Kingdom’s Research Excellence Framework, leaving Swiss institutions with less clarity around future development. Routine updates grew uncertain, and sustaining a decades-old system on aging on-premises servers increasingly fell to a core repo team of one.

The pressure intensified when AI bots began flooding Alexandria with requests, overwhelming the on-premises server. In addition, the university needed a richer data model that could represent not only publications but also the relationships among researchers, projects, and scholarly outputs. Without a structured, interoperable research information system, the full scope of the university’s scholarly contributions remained difficult to surface in academic indexes. That visibility mattered because Alexandria’s strong search rankings represented years of open-access investment by the university.

Of all the providers that the university evaluated, only 4Science could meet all the requirements. The partner also brought higher-education expertise, DSpace-CRIS experience, and ongoing technical management to the project. With separate backend REST and Angular frontend components, 4Science migrated Alexandria from EPrints to DSpace-CRIS on AWS. This open source foundation can also support the broader community of DSpace—an open source digital repo system that thousands of institutions use worldwide. For easy-to-use, high performance block storage at virtually any scale, the team chose Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).

The team also used the DNS service Amazon Route 53, a reliable and cost-effective way to route end users to internet applications. To securely deliver content with low latency and high transfer speeds, the solution relies on Amazon CloudFront. Using Amazon CloudFront edge functions, 4Science preserved the supported legacy URLs and redirected requests to the new repo to protect external links and search engine indexing. So publications and researcher profiles that ranked well in search results remained discoverable after migration.

To monitor, block, or rate-limit common and pervasive bot traffic, the team implemented AWS WAF. The partner configured rules to distinguish malicious traffic from legitimate academic crawlers, protecting Alexandria without blocking the indexing that keeps the university’s research discoverable. Having monthly project-management calls with 4Science, the university has developed a structured way to address configuration changes, bug fixes, and new requirements.

With Alexandria running on AWS and managed by 4Science, the university freed its one-person repo team from on-premises server monitoring, security patching, and infrastructure maintenance. “By migrating about 54,000 records to DSpace-CRIS on AWS, we save 1–2 hours per week on infrastructure management,” says Ruedi Lindegger, repository manager at University of St.Gallen. The Swiss institution can now shift its internal efforts toward university-specific IT needs.

Alexandria continues to hold the strong search rankings it carried over from the EPrints era. And the structured DSpace-CRIS data model gives the university a richer way to represent the full scope of its research output. Consolidated into a single scalable repo, publications, projects, and researcher profiles remain findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. Having established a long-term service relationship, the partner and the Swiss institution work to keep Alexandria stable, open source, and sustainable. “4Science is not a faceless support ticket jungle if you are in trouble,” says Lindegger.