blockchain

[National Science Communication Institute]

Any techies on this list who can comment on whether blockchain technology is something we should be talking about here? I’m a neophyte on this, but blockchain is the technology behind bitcoin. At the risk of mangling the truth, it’s a new kind of internet model that allows information to be linked together in such a way that you can always track the provenance of ideas/papers/whatever. Changes get “approved” by the community, everyone gets access to information without infomediaries, etc. It’s been billed as a pretty disruptive technology---one that’s still really in search of ways to use it. I’m wondering if academic publishing might be one such way---if the day will come when a researcher can share work via blockchain, and then this distributed system basically sorts out the rest---provenance, version of record, categorization, archiving, review, changes, access, etc. We’ve spoken before here about an All-Scholarship Repository to this approach, which I still like---a single repository of global scientific information with thousands of different entry and exit points (customized by institution, country, publisher, etc.---some free, some not depending on value added). The blockchain approach flattens out the entire information ecosystem (in theory). This isn’t to say that publishers won’t exist in this system---quite the opposite in fact: More information and more uncertainty about facts makes the need for publishers all the more important. But this technology might do an end-run around a lot of the systems we currently use and solve a lot of the access problems as well.

 

I have no idea if this is an accurate interpretation or just a lot of misinformation. Bryan? Jake? Lorena? Patrick? You guys all live and breathe technology. Do you think this something we should have our eye on?

 

Thanks,

 

Glenn

 

Glenn Hampson
Executive Director
National Science Communication Institute (nSCI)
Program Director
Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI)

2320 N 137th Street | Seattle, WA 98133
(206) 417-3607 | gham...@nationalscience.org | nationalscience.org

 

 

 

[Christopher Erdmann]

Hi Glenn,

You might find this recent article by Lambert Heller useful:

https://blogs.tib.eu/wp/tib/2017/05/09/how-p2p-and-blockchains-make-it-easier-to-work-with-scientific-objects-three-hypotheses/

-- 

Christopher Erdmann, Chief Strategist for Research Collaboration

NCSU Libraries | https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/
ccer...@ncsu.edu| 919-515-5634 | @libcce

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2554-180X

My pronouns are: he | him | his

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[Fiore, Steve]

Yes. Definitely.  Last year, a colleague suggested something like this in the context of open data and data sharing.  I thought it was brilliant, but I'm not a tech type either.  Here is the article he shared, written by those who are tech types, who lay out a plan/vision for this. 

Best,

Steve

Could Blockchain provide the technical fix to solve science’s reproducibility crisis?

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/07/21/could-blockchain-provide-the-technical-fix-to-solve-sciences-reproducibility-crisis/

--------

Stephen M. Fiore, Ph.D.

Professor, Cognitive Sciences, Department of Philosophy (philosophy.cah.ucf.edu/staff.php?id=134)

Director, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, Institute for Simulation & Training (http://csl.ist.ucf.edu/)

University of Central Florida

sfi...@ist.ucf.edu

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[Fiore, Steve]

FYI, in relation to Glenn's question last month asking about blockchain, I just learned of this new company  (http://www.blockchainforscience.com/). In brief, a group of entrepreneurs (and scholars) are bringing blockchain technology into the open science arena.  But, when looking over their website, it's somewhat opaque as to what they're specifically doing.  The only way I could understand (some of) what they are trying accomplish is by reading their Projects pages.  The easiest one to understand was the one on Research Identity.  When then reading the others I got the impression that they are trying to overlay a blockchain element to just about everything I see happening with organizations like the Center for Open Science and their Open Science Framework (e.g., blockchaining pre-registration -- see http://www.blockchainforscience.com/2017/05/16/smart-evidence/).  But they're also doing more like working with ORCID (see http://www.blockchainforscience.com/2017/05/23/researcher-et-al-identity/).  Given that they're a .com, I'm guessing that they are trying to monetize all of this.  But I could not find anything on the pages about cost.  Anyway, this is an interesting development and potentially important.  Technolibertarianism and capitalism meets science...

Best,

Steve

--------

Stephen M. Fiore, Ph.D.

Professor, Cognitive Sciences, Department of Philosophy (philosophy.cah.ucf.edu/staff.php?id=134)

Director, Cognitive Sciences Laboratory, Institute for Simulation & Training (http://csl.ist.ucf.edu/)

University of Central Florida

sfi...@ist.ucf.edu

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Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2017 3:18 PM
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Subject: Re: blockchain