Increasingly, repositories allow, recommend, or require providing unique contributor identifiers, such as ORCID or ISNI, when depositing contributions. Despite this evolution, few repositories provide a machine interface that allows listing the contributions made by a researcher using their contributor identifier as a key. An interface with this capability, supported across repositories, would facilitate a range of use cases and could be an important next step towards realizing COAR’s Next Generation Repositories vision. This presentation will introduce the core characteristics of authorIDy, a conceptual proposal for such a machine interface. The presentation is mainly aimed at soliciting feedback to inform next steps. Therefor, sufficiently in advance of the presentation, a document will be made available that gives an overview of key aspects of the proposal, which has simplicity at its core.

Scholars rely on a vast network of databases containing peer and non-peer reviewed artifacts to conduct their research. In their quest for information, filtering out what to read or not, they rely on heuristics to access the trustworthiness of the artifacts. Life-cycle information could be used to create better assessments, but this information is spread over many networks, hidden in web pages, or not made available at all. We propose a decentralized communication system in which nodes in a network use a messaging protocol to inform each other about important life-cycle events. This presentation introduces the Event Notifications messaging protocol to orchestrate life-cycle events or exchange information about them. We present how this protocol is implemented in the COAR Notify project connecting institutional repositories with peer-review and overlay journal services. The protocol does not only provide interoperable layer for life-cycle event, but it also provides the technology for a decentralized scholarly communication system in line with COAR’s Next Generation Repository report. In a next phase of Event Notifications, a persistent layer of life-cycle information in the form of Event Logs will be investigated. Using Event Notifications and Event Logs a transparent, interoperable sharing of linkages between research outputs can be achieved.

Increasing the level of FAIRness of resources is high on the agenda of repository developers and managers. The FAIR Signposting profile offers concrete recipes to approach this goal and has therefore seen an increased level of adoption in the international repository community. To further support developers, we have designed and implemented the FAIR Signposting Validator. The validator provides immediate feedback to users regarding the syntactic and semantic validity of their FAIR Signposting implementation. This presentation will outline the design, implementation details, and utility of the validator. We will share the source code openly for the developer community, in order to enable local installations.

A new effort under the “Signposting the Scholarly Web” umbrella specifies a way in which repositories can advertise the interoperability affordances they support by publishing a FAIR Interoperability Catalog, FAIRiCat in short. It also specifies how FAIRiCats can be discovered to support obtaining an insight in the nature of a repository’s investments in interoperability, finding the machine entry points of repository-wide affordances (e.g. SPARQL endpoint), and examples of affordances that are available when interacting with individual objects managed by the repository (e.g. IIIF support).