exploring new ways to research
Image: Election of block producers
DEIP is a decentralized research platform governed by scientists. What mechanisms enable its self-governance and how does it work? Alex Shkor, blockchain architect and founder of the DEIP platform takes us through the thinking that has gone into the development of the DEIP model.
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The premise behind Solid is a simple one: for every single piece of data you create online, you can choose where you store it. This choice does not affect what applications you can view this data with. Instead of letting apps prey on your data, you decide which parts of your personal data pod can be seen by what apps and what people. Since all apps find their data in the same place—your place—there is no need to synchronize: every app always shows you your latest data.
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Caption: ‘International System of Units’. The SI base units: Symbol, Name, Quantity. A ampere electric current. k kelvin temperature. s second time. m metre length. kg kilogram mass. cd candela luminous intensity. mol mole amount of substance. Wikipedia.
Karmen Condic-Jurkic looks at a reboot for academic knowledge infrastructures with the decentralized web as a thought catalyst for making science in new ways: to disseminate knowledge faster and more easily; and to call for a clean start on metrics for making better research by rewarding—best practice, scientific integrity, or to steer research to be socially relevant for example with experiments in tokenomics.
Figure: The process of generating Smart Blockchain Badges by matching the learner’s skills with job offerings.
Today’s centralized education model is no longer sustainable, as learning happens increasingly outside the brick-and-mortar lecture halls of schools, colleges, and universities, in online platforms within communities of like-minded individuals. In the networked, digitally empowered world of the 21st century, education providers often do not have remit or the means and capacity to cover the range of activities learners engage with, which attest their achievements, knowledge, and skills.
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A concluding summary of headline issues from the Open Science theme of ‘software citation’. Software citation is an important building block in the future of Open Science and has run as Generation R’s launch editorial theme. As with all of the topics of focus on Gen R editorially the issue will be revisited on regular occasions as major developments occur.
For the main part it would appear to be the case that until recently no one had indexed, or cataloged, research software. If we compared this situation to the cataloging of literature, and somehow nobody had cataloged publications for the last fifty years, then this would just be unimaginable. But for software this has been the case — for the last half-century there has been virtually no widespread and systematic indexing of software, or its citation in literature. There are exceptions, and the Astrophysics Source Code Library is such an exception and worthy of mention, started in 1999. (ASCL >1999)
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