(26 Oct 2022) The COAR Notify Initiative is developing and accelerating community adoption of a standard, interoperable, and decentralized 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. The COAR Notify Protocol, which builds on the established Linked Data Notifications and ActivityStreams2 W3C standards, is a critical component of the initiative. It defines the type of notifications that are exchanged between interacting parties and specifies the content of those messages, and therefore allows Notify-enabled repositories and services to communicate with each other seamlessly.
Since the Arcadia-funded work began in July 2022, we have made significant progress on several fronts. The initiative is currently working with 13 partners in the first phase of implementation, several of which have begun development of their systems to support the protocol. The Notify team has been assisting partners to prepare implementation plans, and is providing ongoing support for the development work. In turn, our partners are supplying scenarios for how they will use the Notify protocol, and helping to develop a stable but flexible implementation that can support a variety of use cases.
To aid with these implementations, the Notify Team is establishing a technical support environment. In particular, a GitHub repository and Slack channels have been established; and a collaborative handbook for implementers, with the aim of sharing good practices across implementing partners, is in the early stages of development. The COAR Notify Protocol Editorial Board is in the process of defining the Notify editorial process, which is important, as it will determine whether a use case fits into the scope of the Notify Initiative and will outline how decisions are made regarding bespoke scenarios.
There are now two main web resources for the initiative: the COAR website, where you will find an overview of the project and all the latest news; and the COAR Notify Protocol webpages, which contains all the technical documentation and specifications for implementing the protocol.
Read more here.
