One thing that excites me about the current buzz around blockchain technology is its use for open science. I can’t speak to the feasibility, but it seems to me that a distributed ledger could be an ideal place to publish and provide open-access to scientific research papers and articles.

If including a way to store, deliver and update supporting data, a blockchain could deliver research products that link directly to the data and analysis–providing an unparalleled level of provenance and context for research and results. Citations and work building on similar pieces of data could be connected allowing for straighforward literature searches and discovery.

Despite the legal complications of the Sci-Hub project, it seems to me that integrating a distributed ledger like technology would be an ideal approach to accomplish their goals in a robust and open way.

I haven’t looked too deeply, but are there groups trying something like this out?