Event Notifications and Event Logs

The “Event Notifications in Value-Adding Networks” specification provides an interoperable fabric that can be used in scholarly communication to exchange messages among data nodes that make scholarly artifacts available to the network and service nodes that add value to these artifacts. For example, a data repository can have a request-response conversation with a long-term archive that results in the latter relaying the coordinates of an archived version of the dataset to the repository. The push-oriented notification protocol is based on W3C Recommendations, both regarding the messaging protocol and payloads. Implementations of the protocol are in various stages of maturity, the most advanced being the COAR Notify effort that focuses on overlay peer review as a service. An important consequence, and actual design goal, of the conversational interoperability approach, is the ability it provides to bi-directionally interlink the scholarly artifact and the service result in real-time, providing an attractive alternative to current interlinking approaches that by and large are heuristic-based and generate results with significant delays. Another consequence is the ability to publish an Event Log for each scholarly artifact that lists all event notifications that were exchanged about it, providing full transparency about its entire life cycle, including where and how it was registered, archived, reviewed, commented upon, etc. This paper describes essential aspects of the Event Notification protocol and illustrates it using a scenario. It then describes the Event Logs concept and illustrates it by means of that same scenario. It then gives an overview of challenges related to specifying Event Logs that are currently under investigation and largely relate to equipping them with affordances to make them verifiable and trustworthy.