Annotation progress from Hypothes.is

On Tuesday, we announced a major new initiative to bring this vision to reality, supported by a coalition of over 40 of the world’s essential scholarly organizations, such as JSTOR, PLOS, arXiv, HathiTrust, Wiley and HighWire Press, who are linking arms to establish a new paradigm of open collaborative annotation across the world’s knowledge.

Below the fold, more details on this encouraging development.
There is now an official W3C Working Group to standardize annotation. The initiative laid out their near-term goals:

Our goal is that within three years, annotation can be deployed across
much of scholarship. Today, coalition members are in different phases of
engagement. Some have already implemented annotation natively and are
working to increase adoption and develop new uses, others are at the
very beginning of the process. Objectives for the first year, in 2016,
are to begin socializing the progress that’s been made, to identify
opportunities and discuss potential challenges, lay out a common
roadmap, and for most to begin the process of design and experimentation
necessary to implement annotation in their own context.

Getting the various site's commenting and annotation systems to converge on Web standards to provide interoperability will be critical. The announcement continues: