Abstract
In our view the fundamental obstacle to open access (OA) is the lack of any incentive-based mechanism that unbundles authors’ accepted manuscripts (AMs) from articles (VoRs). The former can be seen as the public good that ought to be openly accessible, whereas the latter is owned by publishers and rightly paywall-restricted. We propose one such mechanism to overcome this obstacle: BitViews. BitViews is a blockchain-based application that aims to revolutionize the OA publishing ecosystem. Currently, the main academic currency of value is the citation. There have been attempts in the past to create a second currency whose measure is the online usage of research materials (e.g. PIRUS). However, these have failed due to two problems. Firstly, it has been impossible to find a single agency willing to co-ordinate and fund the validation and collation of global online usage data. Secondly, online usage metrics have lacked transparency in how they filter non-human online activity. BitViews is a novel solution which uses blockchain technology to bypass both problems: online AMS usage will be recorded on a public, distributed ledger, obviating the need for a central responsible agency, and the rules governing activity-filtering will be part of the open-source BitViews blockchain application, creating complete transparency. Once online AMS usage has measurable value, researchers will be incentivized to promote and disseminate AMs. This will fundamentally re-orient the academic publishing ecosystem. A key feature of BitViews is that its success (or failure) is wholly and exclusively in the hands of the worldwide community of university and research libraries, as we suggest that it ought to be financed by conditional crowdfunding, whereby the actual financial commitment of each contributing library depends on the total amount raised. If the financing target is not reached, then all contributions are returned in full and if the target is over-fulfilled, then the surplus is returned pro rata.
Highlights
Consider the following scenario: in 2003 a researcher active in the field of academic publishing and open access (OA) fell into an ‘OA coma’ that lasted for over 15 years
‘unsustainable subscription model’, the oligopolistic structure in the academic publishing market is even more concentrated,[2] the emphasis on OA has shifted from self-archiving non-peer-reviewed preprints to depositing peer-reviewed accepted manuscripts (AMs) in institutional repositories (IRs), but the amount of research hidden behind paywalls is still substantial
We are confident that most librarians and unbiased policymakers would agree that unbundling AMs and published articles does provide the basis for sustainable OA to all scholarly, scientific and medical peer-reviewed research
Summary
Consider the following scenario: in 2003 a researcher active in the field of academic publishing and open access (OA) fell into an ‘OA coma’ (defined as total inability to read, listen to, or engage in anything related to scholarly communication) that lasted for over 15 years. Little has changed, in spite of millions of working hours and millions of pounds having been spent in an effort to move academic publishing to a more rational structure.[3]. The reason for this lack of progress is both patently obvious and surprisingly underplayed. This article has the ambitious aim of stating the substantive problem that has beset academic publishing for the last 25 years or so and suggesting a simple, cost-effective and immediate solution
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