A very quick intro to Blockchain and Open Scholarship

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Everybody talks about Blockchain these days, but why should we consider this technology when thinking about Open Scholarship? In preparation of 2 talks that I give in Berlin at the end of October 2017, I give 2 minutes of thought about it. Join our discussion either right here at TIB blog, in Berlin, or at future TIB events on Blockchain and Open Scholarship!

Imagine a world, where the sum of all scholarly works — papers, research data, anything — is stored, tracked and made accessible in such a way that you do not have to trust the managers or admins of any particular publisher, or for that matter, of any other single entity.

Advanced P2P systems, and in particular Blockchain, bring this opportunity within reach. When we talk about  Open Scholarship today, we need to take these massively decentralized systems, that behave in highly predictable ways, into account.

Just think about recent events like the STM Association conveniently threatening ResearchGate, which many authors trusted with their papers. Or Elsevier, acquiring all kinds of Open scholarly service providers, and then confronts us with a new “definition of Open Access”, which entails geoblocking of large parts of the world. (Which by the way is simply not Open Access.)

Therefore I’ll give 2 talks about this matter: at the Blockchain session of the #Force2017 conference starting October 25 in Berlin, and at the subsequent Hack-and-Share-Weekend on Blockchain and Science at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society.

So, again: Feel invited to join our discussions in Berlin, or follow the TIB blog for more background and future events around Blockchain and Open Scholarship!

Head of TIB Open Science Lab // @Lambo on Twitter and at TIB