Dario Taraborelli, 29/08/2017 18:16:
I am wondering if this could be partly automated to make it scale (detect the citation of a new DOI > extract the author contact email > check if a preprint is available > if not, trigger an email to the author).
It's not especially hard to automate, the question is what to put in the From and Reply-To fields. :) The sender needs to be of interest for the author and somebody knowledgeable needs to be available to answer questions. I can do some super-work and handle a few hundreds support requests from authors for a few weeks but I can't promise to be available forever to do this. ;)
In the future, a social media bot will simultaneously (publicly) notify the author, if the handle can identified and is reliably stored in Wikidata.
We could do this already via ORCID but not that many authors have usable profiles there.
Nemo