Never break the chain

"The open-access model continues to gain momentum – and while many agree this can only be a good thing, there are some niggles which refuse to go away. Niggles like money. Who will pay for all that lovely peer-review administration? Largely, it seems, it will be the authors – the dark-side of open access is the pay-to-publish paradigm.

But do we need to publish science in this way at all? Pre-print servers (arxiv, biorxiv), data only journals (gigascience, geosciencedata) – many new models have sprung up. Even piracy (SciHub, LibGen) is gaining an air of legitimacy against the backdrop of open scientific interest. And now there is another in this increasingly crowded mix, and it all hinges on blockchains."