In November 2017, COAR published the first Next Generation Repositories report which contains a list of 19 technologies and protocols for repository systems. The recommendations are based on a wide array of user stories and behaviours that were vetted and prioritized by the repository community.

On January 23-24, 2020, Open Scholar participated in a meeting convened by COAR to investigate the potential for a common, distributed architecture that would connect peer review with resources in repositories. The aim of the meeting, hosted by Inria in Paris, France, was to share the current workflows of various projects and systems that are managing or developing overlay peer review on a variety of different repository types (institutional, preprint, data, etc.), and assess whether there is sufficient interest in defining a set of common protocols and vocabularies that would allow interoperability across different systems. Open Scholar participated in the meeting presenting the use case of Psicológica, the journal of the Spanish Association for Experimental Psychology, that is at the stage of transitioning from a commercial publisher to an overlay format on top of the DIGITAL.CSIC institutional repository.

In August 2020, COAR made available for public comment a proposed model for a standardised approach to peer review of resources in repositories that was based on the use cases of the January meeting.