COAR Notify Initiative

The COAR Notify Initiative is developing and accelerating community adoption of a standard, interoperable, and decentralised approach (using Linked Data Notifications) to link research outputs hosted in the distributed network of repositories with resources from external services, such as overlay-journals and open peer review services.

COAR is extremely grateful for the generous funding support from Arcadia, a charitable foundation that works to protect nature, preserve cultural heritage and promote open access to knowledge. The funded project began on July 1, 2022 and will last for four years.

COAR Notify Team

Kathleen Shearer, COAR
Paul Walk, Antleaf / COAR
Martin Klein, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Eloy Rodrigues, University of Minho
Tamy Nakano, COAR

Technical Advisors

Herbert Van de Sompel
Patrick Hochstenbach, IDLab, Ghent University

1st Phase Partners

Implementing Partners

What are we doing?

1. COAR Notify Protocol: Developing a common protocol that will be the “technical glue” to enable widespread interoperability across repositories and other services. The protocol uses the established W3C standards Linked Data Notifications and Activity Streams 2.0 to send and receive standardised messages related to requests and responses for peer review and endorsement of resources in repositories. All technical documentation is openly available

2. Scenarios: Maintaining a list of scenarios provided by our implementing partners to illustrate the use of Notify in a number of contexts. View the COAR Notify scenarios

3. Support for Implementing Partners: Working with first phase implementing partners to provide resources and technical support to develop the workflows needed to use of the Notify Protocol.

Why are we doing this?

Widespread adoption of a standard communications protocol will be highly beneficial for the community because it:

Enables broad adoption of innovative models of scholarly communications such as the “read and publish”, overlay journals, and open peer review of preprints
Breaks down content silos and support linking and relationships across content types, repositories and services
Increases the sustainability of scholarly communications by reducing duplication across publishing and repository infrastructures
Improves diversity in the ecosystem by developing an open protocol that is available for any interested repository or service
Builds trust in scholarship and science by enabling greater transparency in the review process