The Notify Project

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:

1. Develop and document the Notify protocol and standard practices that will enable interactions across diverse repositories and services, based on linked data notifications
2. Contribute to the technical development of open source platforms (repositories and services) so the Notify protocol can be widely adopted and used
3. Develop pilot implementations across several portfolios of services at the domain and national /regional levels
4. Build community awareness and support for open peer review and overlay journals
5. 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.