Distributed Organisations for Collaborative Research - Elephant in the Lab

The Web was created as a coordination and cooperation tool for scientists. Subsequently, it had a revolutionary impact on almost all aspects of our life. The rise of a “network society”  did in the end, however, only had a minor effect on the forms of organising among the scientific community. Its paradigm of scientific communication and cooperation between a scholar and a publisher dates back to the early 17th century. This essay is based on a lecture (Etzrodt, 2019a) held during the “Future of Science” session of the Marie Curie Alumni Association’s annual conference at the University of Vienna in February 2019. It highlights the historical roots of today’s challenges in science in scholarly communication, and how open access movements have begun to address this problem. It also proposes how distributed Web technologies (such as IPFS and Ethereum) are poised to enable an entirely new way of communication and cooperation among scientist and citizens. This may lead to the long-sought cultural change within the scientific community, which may finally furnish us with the tools required to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.