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COAR Notify

The COAR Notify Initiative is developing and accelerating 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.

COAR Notify Team

Principal Investigators

  • Kathleen Shearer
  • Paul Walk
  • Martin Klein
  • Eloy Rodrigues
  • Tamy Nakano (coordinator)

Technical Advisors

  • Patrick Hochstenbach
  • Herbert Van de Sompel
Technologies

COAR Notify is a game changing technology that enables bi-directional linking between peer review services, overlay journals and repositories. It contributes to a more interconnected scholarly communication system, and enables thousands of platforms and services repositories in the scholarly ecosystem to communicate with each other using a common protocol.

COAR Notify is based on two well-established W3C technologies/standards: linked data notifications and activity streams.

Common Use Cases

Although there are many different potential use cases for COAR Notify, it is predominantly being used to facilitate the following scenarios:

  1. Authors who deposit their preprint into a repository can request a peer review from a review service
  2. Authors who deposit their preprint into a repository can request to be published by an overlay journal
  3. Researchers who deposit a dataset in one repository can link to an article in a different repository
COAR Notify enables the “Publish, Review, Curate” publishing model to scale

Publish, review, curate (PRC) is an innovative model of scholarly publishing that involves the review, validation, and editorial commentary of a preprint. It introduces much greater openness and transparency across the publishing ecosystem by making the entire scholarly record – manuscripts, reviews, and commentaries – openly available. The COAR Notify protocol, allows PRC services and preprint repositories to exchange messages in a standardised way and will greatly help PRC scale more quickly and easily. Read more about PRC

Decoupling of publishing functions is what enables transformative innovations – The real power of the PRC approach is the decentralization of publishing functions, which fosters innovation at any stage of the workflow without disrupting others. This flexibility opens the door to new peer review initiatives, such as evaluating research data or code, as well as exploring alternative methods for reviewing and endorsing content. The decentralized nature of the preprint-review model also makes it highly adaptable, allowing for the publication of diverse outputs, topics, languages, and contributions from researchers worldwide.

Technical Resources

All COAR Notify resources are openly available to the community.

The Protocol The COAR Notify Protocol defines the format and specifications that enable widespread interoperability across repositories and other services.

Implementation Guide These resources provide guidance and support the growing community of developers considering or actively implementing the COAR Notify protocol.

Implementing Platforms The COAR Notify Initiative is being adopted by a growing number of services and systems. The COAR Notify Catalogue keeps track of who is implementing COAR Notify.

Images and Visualisations Browse COAR Notify images, posters and other visuals.

Interested in adopting COAR Notify? Send us an email

COAR Notify is funded by Arcadia, a charitable foundation. The funded project will end in 2026.

FAQs
How can I use COAR Notify?

COAR Notify is an open protocol that supports standardized communications across scholarly communications platforms. There are numerous use cases for COAR Notify that we are documenting as part of the initiative. To date, COAR Notify is being used to facilitate the following scenarios:

  1. Researchers can link a dataset in one repository with an article in a different repository
  2. Authors who deposit their preprint into a repository can request a peer review from a review service
  3. Authors who deposit their preprint into a repository can request to be published by an overlay journal
Who can implement COAR Notify? Is it available to everyone?

COAR Notify is an open protocol that can be used by anyone. There is, however, some technical development that must be undertaken to the platform in order to support sending and receiving the protocol as well as managing the workflow for processing the messages being exchanged.

Is COAR Notify a publishing platform?

COAR Notify is not a publishing platform. It is a communication protocol that defines the nature and format of standardized messages that are exchanged between systems. That said, COAR Notify is a critical component for the innovative publishing model referred to as the “Publish, Review, Curate” model, as it supports the necessary exchanges between Preprint Servers and Overlay Publishers.

How do I know if COAR Notify is available in my platform / software?

We encourage all platform adopters of COAR Notify to post this COAR Notify-enabled logo which will inform users and other platforms functionality is available.

COAR Notify is already being used by HAL, Peer Community In, Episcience, PREreview and bioRxiv

COAR Notify is available in DSpace 7.6 and DSpace 8, Open Preprint System, and Kotahi platforms

Development is underway in Zenodo, Invenio, ePrints, and PubPub platforms

Is COAR Notify a new technology?

At the COAR Notify Initiative we are not developing new technologies, rather using two well-established W3C technologies/standards: activity streams and linked data notifications. The COAR Notify Protocol defines the vocabularies and the format of the messages being sent between two systems. It enables all COAR Notify-enabled service to communicate with each other.

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