May 5, 2025

The COAR Notify Project has passed the halfway point of the 4-year project funded by Arcadia. In the past 2.5 years, the COAR Notify team has made significant progress in terms of adoption of the COAR Notify Protocol, with several developments still ongoing and several new ones in the pipeline. This post provides an overview of progress since our last update in December 2024. 

The COAR Notify ecosystem

The COAR Notify ecosystem continues to expand and there are now two major clusters of implementers that, together, represent the burgeoning Publish, Review, Curate . The services involved in these groups are composed of repositories – which collect and provide access to preprint; peer review services – which undertake review and endorsement of articles; and an aggregator (sciety) – which collects and provides access to distributed peer reviews. Because all these services are using COAR Notify, they can easily communicate with each other and we anticipate the ecosystem to continue to grow and further interaction across these and other services in the future.

COAR Notify in Open Source repository platforms

At the time of this update, the vast majority of open source repository platforms are either COAR-Notify enabled, or are in the process of adopting the functionality. We expect that by the end of 2025, the vast majority of repositories should support sending and receiving notifications using COAR Notify. The figure below shows the state of progress to date:

You can find an updated list of all COAR Notify-enabled platforms and services in the COAR Notify catalogue.

On April 9, 2025, Preprints.org announced that they have implemented COAR Notify to enable notification exchange with PREreview, an open review platform. The integration seamlessly enables researchers who submit a preprint to Preprints.org to request a review from Preprint and receive expert feedback efficiently. Preprints.org is a multidisciplinary platform providing preprint service that is dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable. They post original research articles and comprehensive reviews, and papers can be updated by authors as long as the updated content has not been published online.

Open Source overlay journal software development

As part of this project, COAR is funding the development of a Notify-enabled open source overlay journal software platform. The platform will enable journal editors to host and run their own overlay journal. This work involves an initial discovery phase whereby the COAR Notify team and Kotahi developers, with input from some journal editors, gather requirements for overlay journals. The requirements will then be transformed into the outline of some specifications and a development plan prepared by Kotahi. The requirements gathering process is now coming to an end and we will begin the development phase of the software development. We anticipate that this software will be publicly available to the community in late 2025.

Promoting Publish, Review, Curate model of publishing

Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) is a model of publishing that involves linking up different open infrastructures in the ecosystem to share, review, and publish articles. It decouples several publishing functions allowing innovations to be introduced into different steps of the publishing workflow. COAR Notify enables PRC to scale because it offers a standard, interoperable mechanism for linking preprints with peer reviews. COAR is currently working on developing key messages to better illustrate and promote this model. As part of COAR’s promotion of the PRC model, we will be organizing two focus sessions in the coming months at the COAR Meetings in Tokyo on May 15 and at the LIBER Conference in early July 2025. The COAR session will be recorded and made available after the meeting.

COAR Notify at Open Repositories 2025

In recognition of the growing interest in COAR Notify in the repository community, there has been a whole session planned with several presentations about COAR Notify at the Open Repositories Conference in Chicago on June 18, 2025. While there is one presentation that was submitted by the Notify team, the other presentations were submitted by implementers/users of COAR Notify protocol.  The session includes the following presentations:

• Using PCI, COAR Notify and EPrints to Re-Invent the Publication Workflow
• Impacts on the Repository of COAR Notify, and tools to help you
• Interoperable verification and dissemination of software assets in repositories using COAR Notify
• Moving repositories out of the periphery and into the center of scholarly publishing

Code libraries for COAR Notify now available

One proven way to speed up the adoption of a new protocol is to provide software libraries – in a range of popular programming languages – so that developers can very quickly evaluate and adopt the protocol without needing to spend time and effort on low-level programming. COAR Notify is establishing and maintaining (for a set of software libraries to support the implementation of the COAR Notify protocol.

The first of these – for Python – is now published and available on the COAR Notify website. More are in development for PHP, Ruby and Javascript/Typescript.

Planning future implementations

For the remaining 1.5 years left in the project, the COAR Notify initiative will continue to provide sub-grants to various platforms and infrastructures. We are currently in discussions with several infrastructures and services to discuss potential implementation including: Evidence / NeuroLibre, Humanities Commons, Software Heritage, Center of Open Science Preprint Servers.