The Notify Project

Project Overview

On January 28, 2021, COAR launched the The Notify Project. The aim of this project is to develop a standard and interoperable approach that will link reviews and endorsements from different services with the research outputs housed in the distributed network of preprint servers, archives, and repositories.

This project involves working with implementing partners to:

1. Aid the development of reference implementations of the identified use-cases involving repositories and networked services
2. Support high-level collaboration to align development in the different implementation projects
3. Support and encourage broad interoperability by establishing common practices, community norms and conventions
4. Engage with relevant development communities (e.g. for important repository and service platforms) to gain support with implementation.

The results of this work will be shared widely with the community so that the technologies and conventions can be adopted by all interested repositories and services.

It should be noted that, although this project is focusing on the peer review use case, these technologies can be used to support a wide variety of interactions between repositories and value added services.

Use Cases

Although these technologies have the potential to support a wide variety of interactions with services and use cases, this project is focusing on three main use cases:

1. Peer review of repository-based resources
2. Endorsement of repository-based resources (e.g. overlay journals, endorsement services)
3. Integration of reviews/endorsements with downstream services

1st Phase Deliverables

• A testing platform to allow implementations to be tested for functionality and standards-compliance
• Community conventions
  • Modelling of use-case scenarios
  • Agreements on simple payload structures and vocabularies to support the use-case scenarios
• Shared knowledge-base and guidance material relating to technical implementation

2nd Phase Deliverables

• Several reference implementations with participating partners