Principal Investigators
- Kathleen Shearer, COAR
- Paul Walk, COAR
- Martin Klein, Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Eloy Rodrigues, University of Minho
Technical Advisors
- Herbert Van de Sompel
- Patrick Hochstenbach, IDLab, Ghent University
Project Overview
On January 28, 2021, COAR launched the The Notify Project. The aim of the project is to development and accelerate community adoption of a standard, interoperable, and decentralised approach to linking research outputs hosted in the distributed network of repositories with resources from external services such as overlay-journals and open peer review services, using linked data notifications.
While our initial focus is on linking pre-prints and articles to peer reviews and endorsements, we will be simultaneously documenting and exploring other, emergent use-cases.
This project involves working with implementing partners to:
- Develop and document the Notify protocol and standard practices that will enable interactions across diverse repositories and services, based on linked data notifications
- Contribute to the technical development of open source platforms (repositories and services) so the Notify protocol can be widely adopted and used
- Develop pilot implementations across several portfolios of services at the domain and national /regional levels
- Build community awareness and support for open peer review and overlay journals
- Develop and maintain a support facility for Notify
We believe this project can potentially have a transformative impact on the research communications ecosystem through:
- Increasing the acceptance in the scholarly community of non-traditional publishing approaches, including the publish and review model, overlay journals, and open peer review.
- Providing a solution that enables research communities to move away from reliance on journals as the main indicator of quality of research, towards a system in which individual research contributions are assessed based on their own merit.
- Building trust in scholarship and science, by enabling greater transparency in the review process and supporting open peer review of openly available scholarly resources.
- Lowering costs and increasing the sustainability of scholarly communications by reducing duplication across publishing and repository infrastructure and decoupling publishing functions, thereby sharing the costs across different infrastructure components.
- Increasing bibliodiversity in the ecosystem, by developing an open protocol that is available for any interested repository or service to utilise, regardless of geographic location, domain, or content type.