It is now possible to register scientific results for free on Bitcoin Blockchain at our ResearchProof for Academy Initiative
Important update: starting today 28 April 2020 all the scientific works registered on the ResearchProof page will be timestamped in both eIDAS compliant timestamping and bitcoin blockchain technology.
The Researchproof for Academy Initiative was launched one month ago in response to the COVID-19 global emergency, to provide scientists worldwide with a new, donation-based tool to prove authorship of scientific results in an internationally, legally valid way and be more incentivised to share those results at an early stage in a worry-free way.
The purpose of the ResearchProof for Academy Initiative is to offer scientists around the world an easy and quick tool to prove authorship of scientific results in a legally valid way, to encourage scientists to share early results in a worry-free way and thus help increase the pace of production of scientific results.
In its first version, the platform used EU eIDAS-compliant, legally valid cryptographic timestamping to prove authorship of works. After a one-month test phase and a stepwise adoption plan, the platform now also fully supports Bitcoin Blockchain Timestamping technology on a global scale for the notarisation of works. Both technologies are used simultaneously for every registration of content.
By using the encryption option, results deposited with ResearchProof for Academy will be totally encrypted and thus not publicly readable — not even by us — unless you decide otherwise. For further information in that sense, please read our previous article here.
To provide free Bitcoin Blockchain Timestamping for the entire scientific community at a sustainable cost, we have used the “Merkle Tree” technique, which allows to concatenate the “fingerprints” of all results registered in a given amount of time, and obtain a “fingerprint of the fingerprints’ chain”. This makes it possible to prove the existence (and the authorship) of multiple results with fewer transactions. This method fully preserves the privacy of each deposited content, so that while it is possible to use the fingerprint registered on blockchain to prove the authorship of a result, it is mathematically impossibile to use it to reconstruct the content’s information. This holds true for both encrypted and non-encrypted content.
The ResearchProof project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 782642.
You can already join the ResearchProof for Academy Registry service through this link. To visit the general ResearchProof project homepage, you can click here instead. We are eager to hear your comments and feedback!
All the best to all,
Adriano, Daniela, Lluís, Suli, Tamara, Rastko, Airleas and all the ResearchProof Team
