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COAR Receives $4M in Funding for Notify Project

COAR Receives $4M in Funding for Notify Project

May 2022

Information Industry News

Madrid, Spain. | May 18, 2022

We are delighted to announce that COAR has been awarded a US$4 million grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. The 4 year grant will go towards the COAR Notify Project, which is developing and implementing a standard protocol for connecting the content in the distributed repository network with peer reviews and assessments in external services, using linked data notifications.

The funding from Arcadia will allow COAR to accelerate and expand current project activities, which have been underway since January 2021. COAR will be working on the project with other lead development partners: Antleaf, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and University of Minho Libraries; a range of implementing services and infrastructures; and certain domain communities.

“We are so pleased to be receiving this funding, which enables us to introduce significant innovation into the broad repository landscape in support of research” says Martha Whitehead, COAR Chairperson and Vice President for the Harvard Library.

The Notify Project builds on years of work undertaken by COAR to enhance the role of repositories, thereby transforming scholarly communications, making it more research-centric, community-governed, and responsive to the diverse needs across the globe.

“The Notify Project will reduce the so-called green/gold distinction by connecting repository contents with external review services”, says Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director of COAR. “It will lead to greater transparency and help increase public trust in science, while also creating a framework for a much more interconnected and vibrant research communications system.”

In order to have the widest impact, the project will work across three dimensions: platforms and services, domain communities, and national/regional environments. The end result will be clusters of interrelated services that are using the Notify Protocol to manage the interactions related to peer review on repository resources, and an open protocol that can be readily implemented by others for a variety of use cases.

For more information, contact Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR kathleen.shearer@coar-repositories.org – www.coar-repositories.org