How Blockchains Can Further Public Science | Bitcoin Magazine

abernard102@gmail.com 2016-03-17

Summary:

"The thing that had me most excited about Bitcoin back in 2013 was its potential to re-align the incentives in academia and re-define how science and research is conducted ... The concepts of pre-registering experiments and widening the scope of acceptable citations begin to address this issue and will likely reap enormous benefits across academia. (I’ll have more to say on this in the future with respect to smart contract factories for experiments). However, the challenge – assuming we want this knowledge free, distributed, and easily accessible (forever) to anyone with an Internet connection – is archiving and indexing all the content such that our assumption is satisfied.  The emergence of the Sci-Hub (see the Robin Hood of Science for the an excellent review) is promising in that it provides free access to vast stores of human knowledge; knowledge otherwise inaccessible if Elsevier had their way. But this solution is not distributed and, as far as I can tell, offers no permanent archival solution.  Enter the InterPlanetary File System: IPFS has emerged as the most likely candidate for long-term knowledge preservation. Using (among other future-proofing features) content-based addressing (a hash) rather than location-based addressing (a URL), reliance on central servers is all but eliminated ... Enough talk. About a week ago, I put together the Marmot Checker, which is another piece of the puzzle in terms of automating knowledge generation throughput. Briefly, an image is uploaded, processed, and sent to the Google Cloud Vision API to get descriptions of the image; these descriptions are checked against a user-defined list of words, and if there is a match, the image is added to the toadserver. Although the implementation is quite is simple, a few hundred lines more of code and you’d have, say, a smart contract that sends the submitter of matched content some amount of tokens as a function of the match score and/or the users’ reputation ..."

Link:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/how-blockchains-can-further-public-science-1457972964

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.preservation oa.indexing oa.crowd oa.p2p oa.tools oa.publishing oa.peer_review oa.data oa.open_science

Date tagged:

03/17/2016, 10:27

Date published:

03/17/2016, 06:27