Blockchain for science and knowledge creation: An intro and overview

Blockchain technology has the capacity to make digital goods immutable, transparent, externally provable, decentralized, and distributed. Besides the initial experiment and data acquisition, all remaining parts of the research cycle could take place within a blockchain system. Attribution, data, data postprocessing, publication, research evaluation, incentivisation, and research fund distribution would thereby become comprehensible, open (at will) and provable to the external world. Currently, scientists must be trusted to provide a true and useful representation of their research results in their final publication; blockchain would make much larger parts of the research cycle open to scientific self-correction. Some claim that this bears the potential to be a new approach to the current reproducibility crisis in science, and could reduce waste and make more research results true.

Here we will provide an introduction and overview. 

Please also see our living document on this topic: https://goo.gl/vz6lCn