Want to learn more? Register below for one of our webinars in January 2025 for a more detailed update and discussion.
Summary of work to date
As of December 2024, we are half way through the COAR Notify Project. Over the last 2.5 years, we have made significant progress with over a dozen services and preprint repositories now actively using COAR Notify to exchange notifications and several others developments underway. In addition, COAR Notify is in the process of being implemented into the main code base of several open source platforms (e.g. Dataverse, DSpace, EPrints, InvenioRDM, Kotahi, and Samvera) making the functionality widely available for users of those software systems.
The main activities undertaken by the project team since the beginning of the project fall into three categories:
Implementation Support
The project has been providing funds and technical support to services and platforms to help with the implementation of COAR Notify. We work with each partner to develop an implementation plan that serves as the basis for an MOU between implementing partners and COAR. Technical support is offered to implementers including an online knowledge base as well as regular exchanges with COAR Notify PIs. In addition to this ongoing support, in March 2024, a technical meeting of implementers was organised in Madrid to discuss challenges and/or difficulties that have been encountered. Several topics were raised at this meeting, and the COAR Notify team has been working to develop solutions to address any issues. The technical website for COAR Notify contains a growing body of resources that have been developed to help implementers.
Managing the COAR Notify Protocol
The COAR Notify Protocol defines the standard format and vocabularies for the messages being sent between implementing systems. It consists of a vocabulary and notification patterns. The protocol introduces a level of interoperability between services and repositories, meaning, for example, that preprint servers do not have to negotiate with every new peer review service about how they will support their exchanges (and vice versa). The protocol has now reached a stable release (version 1.0.0) and although minor changes and improvements are likely, no significant changes are anticipated in the near future. The protocol is formally versioned using the widely-known “Semantic Versioning” conventions.
Community Engagement
Our communications efforts so far have mainly focused on outreach to potential implementers of COAR Notify. There was significant work required in the first phase of the project to introduce and explain what COAR Notify is, what kind of functionality it can support, and make the case that different systems and services will benefit from adopting it. These efforts have been relatively successful in terms of engaging with a wide range of stakeholders and have led to the implementation of COAR Notify by several peer-review services, repositories, and preprint servers. In addition to advocating for COAR Notify as a technology/protocol, we have begun to make the broader case for COAR Notify by promoting the use cases that it enables, such as the Publish, Review, Curate model of publishing, beginning with a workshop organized in October 2024.
Priorities for Next Year
Our priorities for next year continue along the same lines as the last two years but will also include the development of an open source overlay journal platform to help make it easier for research communities to adopt this light-weight and cost effective means of publishing. Specifically, our priorities will be:
- Support for ongoing implementations
- New implementations
- Develop an open source overlay journal platform
- Targeted and expanded efforts around community engagement and outreach
Webinars
Register at the links below to join our discussion about the progress of COAR Notify to date:
January 16th, 13:00h GMT 8:00h ET (Europe, South Asia, and Americas time zones)
January 17th, 00:00h GMT (East Asia and Oceania time zones)
January 17th, 20:00h GMT, 13:00h ET (Americas time zones)