Distributed organisations for Collaborative Research

The scientific community today operates on a paradigm of scientific communication that dates back to the early 17th century. The Web was first and foremost created with the intention to improve cooperation among scientist and to enable coordination of a complex scientific projects. Unfortunately it was then rapidly co-opted by publishing companies and for-profit business models instead of ensuring it to remain an open resource for scientists and society at large. 

Both the hierarchical, outdated nature of how we operate to this date in academic institutions and the demands for metrics to measure research output by public funders that mostly are  generated by publishers leads to a vicious circle that is hard to escape. 

The presentation highlights the historical roots of this problem and how open access movements begun to overcome it.

The distributed Web is poised to enable large scale coordination and cooperation among scientist and citizens, reaching beyond nations and even continents to tackle the world most pressing challenges. The talk thus proposes how we may integrate next generation web technologies that enable self sovereign publishing.