We make research data last forever!

Research results and research data should be openly available for reuse and ideally it should be available forever. Today, trusted third parties provide data storage services. If they cease to exist, contingency plans and bounties are sometimes set at stake to assure the preservation of the data. Furthermore, the data storage is a single point of failure, which might also be a weak point to censorship attempts.

Currently, ‘cloud storage solutions’ that live on a blockchain and that are independent from the hardware or any traditional trusted third party are being developed (MaidSAFE, Storj, Swarm, …). Here, smart contracts and/or tokens act as a stake to ensure data availability.  We will set them up for research data, assess them and provide guidelines how to use them in the context of research (open) data.