The ability for blockchain technology to be tamper proof, has apparent scientific usage.
Manubot is an open source software authored by Himmelstein, the software automatically collates, formats and publishes scientific papers. Every manuscript published or edited via the platform, is documented with logged events on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Himmelstein claims that his software would enable researchers to definitively lay claim to precedence. “Imagine an authorship dispute where two authors claim to have both written the same thing,” he said, this provides an undisputable record of what was written, and by whom.
Himmelstein also stated that authorship disputes wouldn’t be a common occurrence anymore if “Time stamping should be adopted by all preprint servers and journals.” Presently, the Manubot software has prevented any need to refer to its’ time stamps, with over a 100 projects already logged by the software.
The Manubot software makes use of an open source tool OpenTimestamp, to log manuscript changes. It documents timestamps at intervals, and as Bitcoin transactions. Manubots’ author wrote code that enables OpenTimestamp to directly add timestamps to his software. Himmelstein added that OpenTimestamp being intentionally technical, may incline proponents to manually log in blockchain based time stamps on its’ website.
EUREKA!
ScienceMatters aims to improve transparency in scientific research, with the help of blockchain technology. This year ScienceMatters is set to launch Eureka, which is a triple-blinded peer-reviewed publication process. This platform would be Ethereum-based, with anonymous reviewers, but with their publicly available reviews.
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