Ask HN: Which issue-tracking system for staff of our academic research group?

I have good experience for two similar sized (even larger) institutes where I simply put a minimalistic issue tracker (Redmond, Trac, OTRS) behind an E-Mail Gateway. Since email is still dominant in the traditional world of academia, sticking to an address support@institute.example.com is a no brainer.

Having said that, my recommendation would go with OTRS.

Jira :)

It has workflow templates, which save a lot of time for me. Just few examples that I think might be useful for your case, besides project management template: procurement, content management, document approval.

A word of caution - Jira administration could be a time sink if you need more than presets.

If you want issues with multiple boards, Gitlab.

If you want only issues management, Github.

In addition you can have all your docs pushed to the wiki of the same repo.

Anything but Jira :)