COAR is pleased to announce the launch of a new project, Notify: The Repositories and Services Interoperability Project

This project builds on previous work of COAR to advance the vision first outlined in the COAR Next Generation Repositories Initiative – to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value added services will be deployed  – and further articulated in the Pubfair White Paper, which describes a distributed framework for open publishing services.

In 2020, COAR published a generic technical model to enable the linking of preprints and other repository resources with external services, with an initial focus on peer review services. The technical model – which was developed based on a number of use cases provided by preprint servers, repositories, peer review services and overlay journals – applies a distributed, message-oriented approach based on W3C Linked Data Notifications (LDN).

In a practical sense, this model will enable a researcher to deposit an article (or other types of research output) into any compliant repository, choose from a list of peer review services and overlay journals, and request a review. The repository will send an automated message to the peer review service, and further bilateral interactions between the author(s), and the overlay review service(s) will be automated.

The Notify Project will assist implementing partners with adopting a common and interoperable model to support reviews and endorsements on distributed resources in repositories, preprints and archives.

More information is available on the project webpage.