COAR Notify: overview of year one

The COAR Notify Initiative is developing and accelerating community adoption of a standard, interoperable, and decentralised approach to linking research outputs hosted in the distributed network of repositories with resources from external review services. COAR Notify was launched in 2021, and was awarded a significant grant from Arcadia, a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge, in 2022. As of June 30, 2023, we marked the end of the first year of the Arcadia-funded project, which has significantly accelerated our progress on several fronts:

First Phase Implementation Partners

Much of the COAR Notify budget is being distributed to our implementation partners to undertake the developments required to use COAR Notify, and this work is well underway with several groups.

Peer Community In & HAL

This is the most advanced implementation of COAR Notify, which is already being used by these three services to exchange messages related to peer review of manuscripts in Peer Community In (PCI) and Episcience that have deposited into HAL, the French national repository. All three platforms have implemented a Notify inbox/outbox and are undertaking the development required to support COAR Notify in their existing workflows.

As illustrated in the screenshots below, at the end of the exchange, both HAL and PCI place links to the related record so that users of HAL can read the reviews, and users of PCI and Episcience can read the full text manuscript on the HAL repository.

“For PCI, the Notify project has initially allowed for a more accurate definition of how to notify evaluations and recommendations of preprints in preprint servers and open archives. These notifications are now in place in the HAL archive and can easily be implemented in any other open archive or preprint server. Since then, the Notify project, in partnership with DIGITAL-CSIC, has enabled us to precisely define the workflow and necessary notifications for authors to submit a preprint directly from the open archive where they deposit it. The development of this workflow is ongoing.”

Peer Community In

eLife, PREreview & several preprint archives

In this scenario, the COAR Notify Protocol will be used to enable connections between (1) several preprint repositories: bioRxiv, medRxiv, and SciELO Preprints, (2) the preprint review platform, PREreview, (3) eLife journals, and (4) the aggregation and curation service, Sciety. As one example, COAR Notify will support the current workflow involved in eLife’s recently announced “publish, review, and curate” publishing model, whereby they will only consider publishing articles that have been already made public as a preprint. Technical development has already begun and the initial working implementations of COAR Notify in these systems are expected in September 2023.

Portuguese national repository network & journals platform

The adoption of the COAR Notify Protocol in Portugal, led by University of Minho, will enable several of their national services to interoperate and communicate with each other. There are three types of services which will be involved in this use case – institutional repositories, hosted locally (like at UMinho) or at the national repository hosting platform, Portuguese journals at the national journal hosting platform or from academic presses, and data repositories (both institutional and national level). COAR Notify will be used to connect the manuscripts in Portuguese repositories with related overlay journal endorsements and reviews in national journals (and other international services already implementing Notify), and relevant data sets contained in data repositories. The development for the repositories, which are using DSpace, and start upgrading to DSpace 7, has already begun and is expected to be complete in the fall of 2023.

Harvard’s publication repository & data repository

The Harvard use case involves connecting related resources contained in their two repositories DASH, the Harvard institutional repository and Harvard Dataverse, their data repository. This means, when a researcher deposits a dataset into Harvard Dataverse, they can use COAR Notify to send the link directly to the related publication, which can then be posted on the landing page – and vice versa.

Scaling beyond the first phase implementers

Our aim is to have COAR Notify widely available across numerous infrastructures and services in the scholarly ecosystem. A number of our implementing partners are using open source platforms and our aim is to have the COAR Notify technology adopted into the main source code of as many platforms as possible, so that it is widely available. Fortunately, there has been significant interest in adopting COAR Notify with several platforms including Dataverse, DSpace, Invenio, Kotahi, and Open Journals Systems. While timelines vary based on the technology roadmaps for each platform, it is expected that by the end of 2024 most of these systems will be COAR Notify-enabled, making the functionality available to all users of the latest versions of these open source platforms.

The Protocol

The COAR Notify Protocol defines the nature and type of notifications that will allow participating repositories and services to “speak the same language” when exchanging information. Over the last year, the protocol has been well documented, with all information publicly available on the website. In addition, an Editorial Board has been formed to manage the protocol, and an editorial process has been established.

The Validator

We decided to combine two early project deliverables, the validator and the Linked Data Notification (LDN) Inbox, into one implementation. We developed both components and made them openly available to implementation partners in support of their development efforts. The inbox provides a simple interface to which partners can send a notification and the incorporated validator provides real-time feedback on the compliance of the payload to the Notify protocol. With this setup in place, COAR Notify adopters have a service at their disposal to check that their messages are using the Protocol in compliance with community conventions as defined through the initiative. The service implementation will naturally progress and its functionality will be refined over time with collected feedback from COAR Notify implementation partners. The validator is currently available to implementation partners and will be made public soon.

Next Steps

With our first phase partners, the COAR Notify team has been gaining experience about how best to deploy COAR Notify that will be used to assist with future implementations. Following the success of the early implementations, we look forward to these first-phase platforms expanding the number and variety of services with whom they interact, as we launch development work with second-phase partners.