The Notify Project receives a $4 million grant from the Arcadia Foundation

Open Scholar celebrates its 10th anniversary with an exciting announcement.

The Notify project, led by COAR in collaboration with Open Scholar and other major implementing partners like the Spanish National Research Council, Harvard Library, Peer Community In and others, has received a $4 million grant from the Arcadia Foundation.

Notify is a continuation of the Next Generation Repositories initiative, to which Open Scholar contributed significantly by helping to develop a protocol for open peer review as an overlay service on top of Open Access institutional repositories. Notify takes this model a step further by developing and implementing a standard protocol for connecting resources in a distributed network of repositories with peer reviews and evaluations offered by external service providers, such as overlay journals or any community of peers. Technically, this is achieved using Linked Data Notifications, a W3C standard protocol chosen specifically to facilitate the adoption of Notify by web servers and applications.

Open Scholar participates in this collaborative effort with the use case of the Diamond Open Access journal Psicologica, whose articles and reviews are published exclusively in DIGITAL.CSIC, the institutional repository of the Spanish National Research Council. Earlier this year, Open Scholar coordinated the transition of Psicologica, the journal of the Spanish Society of Experimental Psychology, from a traditional commercial publication model to a repository-overlay model. This transition was made possible in large part thanks to our previous collaboration with DIGITAL.CSIC for the development of an Open Peer Review Module for DSpace repositories.

Notify, whose four-year funding will begin in July this year, is therefore the natural evolution of a series of projects perfectly aligned with the founding vision of our organization: to replace commercial publishers with a distributed network of institutional repositories.

Looking back, it is certainly gratifying to see how far we have come towards this goal over the past ten years. While there are still many important challenges ahead, we hope that, with the necessary support from the research and library communities, in another 10 years we will have many more examples of direct collaborations between scholars and their librarians to produce, curate, archive and distribute the global knowledge commons.

Happy Anniversary Open Scholars!!!