On January 23-24, 2020, COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) convened a meeting to investigate the potential for a common, distributed architecture that would connect peer review with resources in repositories. The aim of the meeting, hosted by Inria in Paris, France, was to share the current workflows of various projects and systems that are managing or developing overlay peer review on a variety of different repository types (institutional, preprint, data, etc.), and assess whether there is sufficient interest in defining a set of common protocols and vocabularies that would allow interoperability across different systems.

Meeting participants reviewed and discussed a number of different use cases. While each case has its own unique attributes, it was clear that there are significant similarities in terms of functionalities and objectives. A draft architecture for distributed peer review on repositories, applying existing web technologies and standards such as Linked Data Notifications and Activity Streams 2.0, was presented by Herbert Van de Sompel of DANS and prototyped by Martin Klein of Los Alamos National Laboratory. By the end of the meeting, there was a consensus by participants that it would be worthwhile to further specify the proposed architecture, through detailing the use cases, developing a common model, and further profiling the technologies. This work will be undertaken in the coming weeks and months.

The outcome of this work could be extremely powerful. It would allow us to move away from the current ‘system to system’ approach to a highly distributed, technically efficient overlay peer review architecture, which would enable any compatible repository and peer review service to participate in the network. This profiling builds on previous work of COAR such as Next Generation Repositories and Pubfair. COAR will provide regular updates about the progress of this work and all results will be widely shared once stable outcomes are available. For more information, please contact Kathleen Shearer, COAR Executive Director: [email protected]

Meeting Participants

Serge Bauin, CNRS
Isabel Bernal, CSIC
Martin Klein, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Thomas Lemberger, EMBO
Pierre Mounier, OPERAS
Frans Oort, University of Amsterdam
Pandelis Perakakis, Open Scholar and University of Granada
Jessica Polka, ASAPbio
Travis Rich, Knowledge Futures Group
Laurent Romary, Inria
Eloy Rodrigues, COAR and University of Minho
Tony Ross-Hellauer, Graz University of Technology
Kathleen Shearer, COAR
Herbert Van de Sompel, DANS
Raphael Tournoy, CCSD
Paul Walk, COAR and Antleaf
John Willinsky, PKP and Stanford University
Saskia Woutersen, Leiden University