Decentralized Open Science

The Decentralized Open Science Subgroup, consisting of Marco Beck, Cornelius Ihle, and Dennis Trautwein, aims to employ decentralized information technology to foster the open science movement. As described in the twelve Vienna principles, Open Science aims to make scientific processes more transparent and results more accessible. However, there are many incentives to abstain from doing Open Science, e.g., confidentiality, to keep a competitive advantage. We believe surpassing inherently scientific incentives is critical for a self-sustaining open science ecosystem.

Free and Open Source Software can look back on an impressive success story. This success introduced new incentives like faster development, faster innovation, and improved reliability. We expect similar positive effects on Open Science. Building tools (Open Source Software) for interdisciplinary Open Science is a resulting logical consequence.

Decentralization is the final iteration towards transparency and openness that we strive for. We want to eliminate data silos and the dependency of Open Science tools on nontransparent central service providers.

We are in particular interested in the following fields:

Content Protection

One pillar for risk-less Open Science is data protection. Our tools provide functionalities to obfuscate or anonymize sensitive data.

Intellectual Property Protection

A second pillar is the attribution of intellectual property. Tools that prove and track ideation, research, and development with the help of decentralized time-stamping safeguard our Open Science projects.

Similarity Detection

Similarity detection provides a powerful tool to detect wrongful attribution of intellectual property.

Reliable Data Stores

Decentralized data stores offer the possibility to keep scientific data available and accessible.

Shared Computational Infrastructure

We deploy Distributed Ledger Technology to reward and journalize computational incentive evaluation tasks and Open Science tools, helping institutions and researchers to combine their computational resources.

CONTACT

LINKS

GitHub

RELATED PUBLICATIONS

2022

  1. Design and Evaluation of IPFS: A Storage Layer for the Decentralized Web
    D. Trautwein, A. Raman, G. Tyson, I. Castro, W. Scott, M. Schubotz, B. Gipp, and Y. Psaras
    ACM SIGCOMM 2022 Conference (SIGCOMM ’22), Amsterdam, Netherlands, 2022.
    PDF Core Rank A*
  2. Towards Portable Identities in the Matrix Protocol
    C. Ihle, F. Deifuss, M. Schubotz, and B. Gipp
    in 2022 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems Workshops (ICDCSW), Bologna, Italy
    PDF

2021

  1. Introducing Peer Copy – A Fully Decentralized Peer-to-Peer File Transfer Tool
    D Trautwein, M Schubotz, B Gipp
    PDF Core Rank A
  2. Academic Storage Cluster
    A Tottleben, C Ihle, M Schubotz, B Gipp
    Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE joint conference on digital libraries in 2021
    DOI: 10/gn3s2j
  3. procd: A privacy-preserving robust implementation to discover contacts in social networks
    F Deifuß, C Ihle, M Schubotz, B Gipp
    Information between data and knowledge
    DOI: 10.5283/EPUB.44954 Preprint

2020

  1. A first step towards content protecting plagiarism detection
    C Ihle, M Schubotz, N Meuschke, B Gipp
    Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE joint conference on digital libraries in 2020
    DOI: 10.1145/3383583.3398620 Preprint Core Rank A*

2019

  1. Smart Contract-Based Role Management on the Blockchain
    C Ihle, O Sanchez
    Business Information Systems Workshops
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04849-5_30 Core Rank B
  2. Securing the Integrity of Time Series Data in Open Science Projects Using Blockchain-Based Trusted Timestamping
    P Wortner, M Schubotz, C Breitinger, S Leible, B Gipp
    Proceedings of the Workshop on Web Archiving and Digital Libraries (WADL) co-located with the Annual International ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL)
    PDF Preprint
  3. Overview of Licensing Platforms Based on Distributed Ledger Technology
    A Schoenhals, T Hepp, S Leible, P Ehret, B Gipp
    Proceedings of the 52nd International Conference on System Sciences
    PDF Preprint

2018

  1. Tracking of Intellectual Property Using the Blockchain
    A Schoenhals, T Hepp, P Ehret, B Gipp
    DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2537209 Bibtex
  2. Design Thinking Using the Blockchain – Enable Traceability of Intellectual Property in Problem-Solving Processes for Open Innovation
    A Schoenhals, T Hepp, B Gipp
    Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains for Distributed Systems (CryBlock’18)
    DOI: 10.1145/3211933.3211952 Preprint