Fostering Open Science by using Blockchain Technology

Sectors like finance, science, production, licensing, and education are gaining more and more interest in blockchain technologies (BT) and start to develop BT-based applications to benefit from the unique characteristics of this technology. BT promises benefits in trust, collaboration, organization, identification, credibility, and transparency. 

In our research, we focus on the application of BT in science, in particular, open science. The idea behind open science is to make scientific research more transparent and accessible to mitigate problems. Examples are intransparent review processes, plagiarism, restricted freedom of research, and paywalls restricting access to scientific publications.  

In a first step, we analyzed existing BT-based applications related to open science according to the following criterions: 

• Does the application build on a custom or existing blockchain (like, e.g., Bitcoin)?  

• Which consensus method is used? Proof of work, proof of stake, or other. 

• Which are the target phases within the research cycle? We divided the phases into evaluation/idea, experiment, documentation, processing, analysing, publication, and reputation. 

• How well is the application documented?  

• What is the maturity level of the application? Concept, prototype, or deployed. 

In total, we investigated 43 applications which we identified primarily by search engines (e.g., Google Scholar) and divided them into the categories reproducibility (9), trustability (12), decentralized storage/database (7), marketplace (4), identity management (3), privacy/confidentiality (2), and infrastructure providers (6). Regarding maturity level, the vast majority of applications is in the concept phase. Some prototypical systems are available, but there are only a few deployed and well-established applications (e.g., OriginStamp, Hyperledger, and Bernstein). 

Our analysis showed that existing projects and applications do not yet make use of the full potential of BT. Thus, our research goal is to develop ideas for further applications. We imagine, for example, using BT to store study designs and hypotheses tamper-proof, as well as all survey results. Storing this information in a blockchain ensures that the results can be compared to the hypothesis verifiably. Another idea targets the Internet of Things where, e.g., measurement data of sensors could be stored in a blockchain ensuring that the data cannot be manipulated later on. This would increase the credibility of experiments that are too complex to be reproducible by a third party. 

Finally, we point out challenges that need to be addressed in the future to make sure the scientific community can benefit from BT. One of the challenges we identified is the design and development of correct and secure smart contracts. Such contracts often manage valuable resources (information or money in the form of cryptocurrencies) which could get inaccessible (even for the owner) or stolen if functional correctness and security are not given. Thus, we forecast that approaches for the evaluation and formal verification of smart contracts will become crucial in the future. Finally, in our view, researchers and the blockchain community should address topics like standardization and frameworks to facilitate access and use of BT and therefore, to increase its rate of adoption in the scientific community and beyond. Overall, we analyzed current blockchain applications and projects for science to create a state-of-the-art view, described our ideas for the future to foster science and identified challenges that need to be addressed to use the full potential of the BT.