Publishing without Publishers: A Decentralized Server Network for Scientific Data

There exist currently no efficient, reliable, and agreed-upon methods for publishing scientific datasets, which have become increasingly important for science. To solve this problem, we propose to design scientific data publishing as a Web-based bottom-up process, without top-down control of central authorities such as publishing companies.

We present a protocol and a server network to decentrally store and archive data in the form of nanopublications, an RDF-based format to represent scientific data with formal semantics. We show how this approach allows researchers to produce, publish, retrieve, address, verify, and recombine datasets and their individual nanopublications. Due to the use of trusty URIs, which include cryptographic hash values of the content they represent, all content in the network is verifiable and immutable.