(7 June 2019) ARTiFACTS and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) announced today a collaboration to investigate how blockchain technology can advance the way scientific data is handled. By providing the possibility to record a permanent, valid, and immutable chain of research data in real-time, the recognition of scholarly contributions by the MPS research community will be lifted to a new level. Working with the Max Planck Digital Library, a central unit of the Max Planck Society (MPS) that supports thousands of scientists in their publication and research data management efforts, both teams are collaborating to advance the effectiveness of blockchain-based solutions for improving scholarly research and communication.
It is universally recognized that sharing research findings earlier in the research process will accelerate discoveries. However, today’s scholarly communication process provides no system for sharing, discovering and attributing most scientific outputs. This delays the sharing of results, prevents scientists from receiving recognition in the form of citations to their contributions, impedes funding opportunities and career advancement.
In collaboration with MPDL, ARTiFACTS will develop blockchain smart contracts and decentralized applications (dAPPs) on the bloxberg Blockchain enabling MPG scientists to receive recognition for all of the research materials they create. “Scientists repeatedly tell us they seek a secure, reliable and efficient method of sharing research materials in ways that both protect their intellectual property and enable them to receive recognition in real-time for their contributions,” said ARTiFACTS President and Co-Founder, Dave Kochalko. “By providing ARTiFACTS services over the distributed ledger platform supported by the Max Planck Digital Library, we are pleased to advance the mission of this world class research organization.”
“This collaboration is an ideal fit with the forward-looking innovation our Digital Labs seeks to bring to the MPS research community,” said Sandra Vengadasalam, Head of the Digital Labs Department of the Max Planck Digital Library. “Backed by an experienced team delivering creative research information solutions, we look forward to working with ARTiFACTS and accelerating the velocity of MPS research.
About ARTiFACTS
ARTiFACTS, creators of the world’s first blockchain-based collaboration and attribution platform for scholarly research, provides a user-friendly platform, purpose built for academic and scientific research that leverages blockchain technology. Researchers can record a valid and immutable chain of records in real-time, from the earliest stages of research for all research artifacts, including citing/attribution transactions. While today’s digital scholarship merely creates linkages among an artificially narrowed subset of indexed publications long after discoveries are made, ARTiFACTS focuses on capturing and linking knowledge from its initial ideation throughout the research process to informal and formal dissemination. By using the ARTiFACTS platform, researchers will be able to immutably prove ownership and existence of novel work, expand access to their research artifacts, provide and receive real-time attribution for novel work and more comprehensively and rapidly build and demonstrate their body of scholarly contributions.
To learn more, visit us at artifacts.ai and follow us on Twitter @ARTiFACTS_ai.
About the Max Planck Society
The Max Planck Society conducts basic research in the natural sciences, life science, and humanities. The 84 Max Planck Institutes and 17 Max Planck Centers internationally focus on research fields that are innovative and address forward-looking scientific questions. The Max Planck Digital Library is a central service unit of the Max Planck Society dedicated to the strategic planning, development and operation of digital infrastructures necessary for providing Max Planck Institutes with scientific information, publication support and research data management services. With its Digital Labs department, MPDL ensures a constant pipeline of new technologies to provide innovative and sustainable services for all Max Planck researchers.
To learn more, visit us at https://www.mpdl.mpg.de/, and follow us on Twitter @mpdl and Instagram @mpdldigitallabs.
The original press release can be found here.
