Explainer · Plain-language

Coar Notify: Definition, Meaning & Examples | CASRAI

COAR Notify is an initiative to link repositories with external services — such as peer review, endorsements, and overlay journals — using open, standard web protocols. Instead of relying on a single central platform, it lets repositories and services exchange notifications about resources in a distributed way, so a preprint in one repository can be connected to a review or endorsement hosted elsewhere.

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The short answer

The COAR Notify Initiative, led by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), defines a standard way for repositories and external services to notify one another about activities relating to their resources. It uses W3C Linked Data Notifications (LDN) together with the Activity Streams 2.0 vocabulary to send and receive structured, machine-readable messages. This enables distributed workflows — for example linking a deposited preprint to a peer review, an endorsement, or an overlay journal hosted on a separate service — without funnelling everything through one centralised platform. It supports the emerging "publish, review, curate" model, in which a work is shared first and then reviewed and curated by independent services that connect back to the original repository copy.

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The problem of connecting repositories and services

Repositories hold a great deal of scholarly content — preprints, accepted manuscripts, datasets — but the services that add value around that content, such as peer review, endorsement, or curation, often live elsewhere. Historically, connecting the two has meant building bespoke integrations or routing activity through large central platforms, which can concentrate control and create lock-in. COAR Notify addresses this by providing a common, lightweight way for any repository and any compliant service to talk to each other. A repository can announce that a resource is available for review, and a review service can notify the repository when a review exists, with each system keeping its own copy and control of its content.

Linked Data Notifications and Activity Streams

COAR Notify is built on existing open web standards rather than a new bespoke protocol. It uses W3C Linked Data Notifications (LDN), a standard mechanism for sending, receiving, and storing notifications between web resources. The content of those notifications is expressed using Activity Streams 2.0, a vocabulary for describing actions and events in a structured, machine-readable form. By combining these standards, COAR Notify defines a small set of notification patterns — such as requesting a review, announcing that a review or endorsement exists, and offering or accepting an action — that participating systems implement. Because the underlying technologies are open and widely supported, services across the ecosystem can interoperate without depending on any single vendor.

A distributed alternative to centralisation

The defining characteristic of COAR Notify is its distributed design. Rather than aggregating content and activity into one platform, it lets value-adding services remain independent while still being connected to the repositories that hold the underlying resources. Each participant retains control over its own systems and data and simply exchanges notifications with others. This matters for the resilience and diversity of scholarly infrastructure. A network of interoperating repositories and services is harder to capture or lock in than a single dominant platform, and it allows new review, endorsement, and curation services to plug into existing repository content by speaking the same notification language.

Supporting publish, review, curate

COAR Notify is closely associated with the "publish, review, curate" (PRC) model of scholarly communication. In this model, an author first makes a work available — typically as a preprint in a repository — and review and curation then happen openly afterwards, often through separate services, rather than being bundled inside a single journal's closed workflow. Notifications are the connective tissue that makes this work: when an independent service reviews or endorses a deposited preprint, it notifies the repository, which can surface the link back to its copy. This lets a distributed set of repositories, preprint servers, overlay journals, and review services collaborate around the same resources, advancing more open and modular models of communication.

Key facts

At a glance

Definition: A protocol linking repositories with external services
Led by: COAR, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories
Standards: W3C Linked Data Notifications and Activity Streams 2.0
Approach: Distributed notifications, not a central platform
Connects: Peer review, endorsements, and overlay journals
Supports: The "publish, review, curate" model

Common misconceptions

What people often get wrong

Often heard: COAR Notify is a single platform that hosts repositories and reviews.

Actually: No — it is a notification protocol that lets independent repositories and services connect to one another. Each system keeps its own content; only structured messages are exchanged.

Often heard: It invents an entirely new technology for messaging.

Actually: No — it is built on existing open web standards: W3C Linked Data Notifications for the mechanism and Activity Streams 2.0 for the vocabulary.

Often heard: It is only for peer review.

Actually: No — although peer review is a key use case, the same notification patterns connect endorsements, overlay journals, and other curation services to repository resources.

Going deeper