Research data management is a collective activity involving multiple stages and players, such as the researcher responsible for initiating data collection and curation, the data protection officer, the research engineers for metadata enrichment, the research engineers for mass data deposit and the archivists for data preservation.All these players in the data life cycle may be scattered across different organizations, institutions and research infrastructures.

The ambition of the COAR-Notify for Research Data working group is to initiate a process of reflection aimed at taking advantage of the web's native interoperability capabilities and the various standards that govern it, with a view to streamlining the business activities and processes involved in and by research data management.

Recent years have seen a flourishing of initiatives aimed at re-decentralizing the web by extending existing open web standards to give priority to user autonomy in the face of web providers who tend to store their data in a way that is often limited to certain systems, and which does not allow them to choose alternative ways of exploiting their data. This is illustrated by the recent creation of a W3C working group dedicated to Linked Web Storage: its aim is to standardize a protocol that should enable loose coupling between applications on the one hand, and identity and storage servers on the other.

It is in this context that the "Event Notifications in Value-Added Networks" specification was developed, implemented by the COAR Notify initiative. The aim of this initiative is to promote the adoption of a protocol enabling multiple services such as data warehouses and peer review services to communicate in order to improve the quality of their resources. An example of enrichment implemented thanks to this protocol is the publication of bi-directional links linking together research products deposited in different warehouses (a dataset deposited in a data warehouse and a publication deposited in HAL and citing this dataset, for example).

However, the COAR-Notify initiative focuses mainly on scientific publications, leaving aside the specificities and life cycle of other research products such as data. The objective of the CN4RD working group is therefore to propose a scenario specific to this domain, such as notification of the registration of a new dataset to all Research actors likely to manage it in the rest of its lifecycle, and to enrich the COAR-Notify protocol with notification models, vocabularies and workflows adapted to this scenario.

Made up of researchers and research engineers, the CN4RD working group draws on the experience and environment of EHESS, notably through its Pôle Numérique Recherche, in close collaboration with the PROGEDO research infrastructure. This one-day workshop is dedicated to explaining how COAR-Notify works and how it is currently implemented in HAL, as well as to putting into practice a specific use case involving the registration of new datasets.

 Programs

9:30 am: Welcome and Coffee

10:00: Opening by Hanen Bellili

10:15am: Event Notifications & COAR Notify (intervention in English) - by Patrick Hochstenbach (ID-LAB, Ghent University)

This presentation offers a brief introduction to the current state of scholarly communication and the rationale behind advocating for a decentralized and decoupled scholarly communication system. It will outline the essential functions required to build such a system. The Event Notifications protocol addresses key challenges faced by many decentralization initiatives by enabling communication through the exchange of asynchronous messages. COAR Notify is a profile of the Event Notifications protocol, tailored to real-world use cases in peer review and journal endorsement. The presentation will also provide an overview of COAR Notify’s features and explore its potential application in research data use cases.

Patrick Hochstenbach has worked for over 30 years in academic libraries across Belgium, the United States, and Sweden. He is currently employed at Ghent University Library as a data integrator and is pursuing a PhD in computer science on the topic "Scholarly Communication on the Decentralized Web", in collaboration with IMEC/ID-Lab. He serves as a technical advisor to the COAR Notify initiative and the COAR working group on the challenges posed by AI bots in repository systems. Patrick is the principal author of the Event Notifications protocol and has published internationally on topics including Web protocols, scholarly communication, Solid, policy languages, and RDF reasoning.

11:00 am: Feedback: implementing COAR-Notify in HAL (provisional title) - by Raphaël Tournoy (CCSD, CNRS)

12:00 pm: Lunch break

2:00 p.m.: Practical workshop: COAR-Notify for research data in a simplified setting

3:00 pm: Discussions and closing

Practical information

This study day will take place at EHESS, 54 boulevard Raspail 75006, in room B1-01 (1st floor left). Access by metro line 4 (Saint-Placide station) or metro line 12 (Sèvres-Babylone station).

The study day will be held in English and French.