The COAR Notify Project, funded by Arcadia and now beyond the midpoint of its four-year duration, has reported continued expansion in the adoption of the COAR Notify Protocol. Since the previous update in December 2024, multiple developments have progressed, and additional implementations are underway.
The growing COAR Notify ecosystem now comprises two primary clusters of implementers aligned with the Publish, Review, Curate (PRC) model. These include repositories that host preprints, peer review services that evaluate and endorse scholarly content, and aggregators such as Sciety that collate and provide access to distributed peer reviews. As all participating services adopt the COAR Notify protocol, interoperability among them is increasing, supporting broader communication and exchange across platforms.
Open source repository platforms have shown substantial progress toward adopting COAR Notify. Most major platforms are either fully enabled or in the process of implementation, with broad support for the protocol anticipated by the end of 2025. An updated catalogue of COAR Notify-enabled platforms and services is available through the COAR Notify website.
On April 9, 2025, Preprints.org implemented COAR Notify to support integration with PREreview, an open review platform. This enables authors submitting to Preprints.org to initiate peer review requests directly and receive expert feedback. Preprints.org offers multidisciplinary preprint hosting, with functionality to permanently archive and cite early-stage research outputs and allow authors to submit updates prior to formal publication.
As part of the broader initiative, COAR is also supporting the development of a Notify-enabled open source overlay journal software platform. This software will allow journal editors to establish and manage overlay journals independently. The project has completed its initial requirements-gathering phase—conducted collaboratively with Kotahi developers and select journal editors—and will now proceed to software development. Public release of the platform is expected in late 2025.
COAR is further advancing the Publish, Review, Curate model, which connects independent open infrastructures to separate and coordinate functions of content dissemination, review, and curation. The Notify protocol underpins this model by standardizing the linkage between preprints and peer reviews. To support broader understanding and uptake, COAR is currently developing messaging materials and will host two focus sessions on the PRC model during the COAR Meeting in Tokyo on May 15 and at the LIBER Conference in July 2025. The Tokyo session will be recorded and made available online.
In response to increased community interest, a dedicated session on COAR Notify will be held at the Open Repositories Conference in Chicago on June 18, 2025. In addition to one presentation from the Notify project team, the session will include contributions from external implementers. Scheduled presentations include:
• 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
To accelerate adoption, COAR is also maintaining a suite of protocol-specific software libraries. The first of these, developed for Python, is currently available, with additional libraries underway for PHP, Ruby, and JavaScript/TypeScript.
In the final 18 months of the project, COAR will continue to offer sub-grants to support further implementations. Discussions are ongoing with several infrastructures, including Evidence / NeuroLibre, Humanities Commons, Software Heritage, and the Center for Open Science Preprint Servers.
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