The COAR Notify Team is compiling a COAR Notify Developers’ Handbook, and an early iteration is now available online. The Handbook is intended to support the growing community of developers considering or actively implementing the COAR Notify protocol. It offers guidance on implementing the COAR Notify Protocol at a technical level. It may also be of interest to others, as it provides a better understanding of how the protocol can be properly used by different platforms and services. The Handbook is an active resource that will continue to evolve over time, as new knowledge is gained working with implementing partners. The COAR Notify team welcomes your feedback about any material in the handbook.
The Handbook joins a growing knowledge base about COAR Notify, including the COAR Notify Protocol website, and the Notify web pages on the COAR website. All knowledge resources produced through the initiative will be made openly available to support our aim of widespread adoption of COAR Notify in platforms and services around the world.
Other Updates
The COAR Notify Initiative is developing and accelerating community adoption of a standard, interoperable, and decentralised approach to link research outputs hosted in the distributed network of repositories with resources from overlay-journals and other types of peer review services.
With funding from Arcadia, the COAR Notify Initiative is able to assist implementing partners with financial and technical support to use the COAR Notify Protocol. First phase partners are at various stages of implementation, however it is anticipated that there will be at least one working demonstration of COAR Notify by early summer 2023. We also aim to ensure that the functionality is widely available in open source platforms, so that many different organizations and services can participate in the Notify-enabled ecosystem.
Over the past few months, there has been significant interest in the initiative and the benefits it will bring to the scholarly communications system. COAR Notify team members have met with numerous interested organizations and stakeholders to explain how it works and discuss different use cases. In addition, we have been invited to give presentations at various venues. In December, Kathleen Shearer presented at the Recognizing Preprint Peer Review workshop, which was organized by HHMI, ASAPbio, and EMBO. The meeting aimed to promote community consensus and support for preprint peer review and to create funder, institutional, and journal policies that recognize both preprints with reviews, and reviews of preprints. The COAR Notify Protocol, which offers a standard way for direct interactions between preprints/repositories and review services, can significantly help to scale preprint review beyond the few services and platforms currently available. There was also a presentation at the UN Open Science Conference in New York in February 2023. This was a great opportunity to present the COAR Notify Initiative to a very broad audience of over 2000 participants and led to greater awareness of the goals of the initiative.
