Arweave + Charité staff: Solving the reproducibility crisis with the blockweave
Arweave will be collaborating with biomedical scientists from Charité, one of the largest university hospitals in Europe, to create a brand-new open access scientific journal. The Journal of Raw Data will be an online-only open access peer-reviewed biomedical data journal, utilising the Arweave network for truly permanent data storage.
Arweave is a permanent decentralised knowledge-storage system that is built to withstand everything from nuclear war to political censorship. You can learn more about the Arweave project on our website.
Established over 300 years ago, Charité is one of the most esteemed research institutions in Europe, laying claim to over half of all German Nobel prize winners in Medicine and Physiology. Charité and its staff have a sincere dedication to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Coupled with Arweave’s own passion and commitment for freedom of information and dissemination of knowledge, we are truly thrilled to partner with staff from such a respected institution so aligned with our own values.
The creation of JoRD aims to address key problems contributing to the current ‘reproducibility crisis’ in biomedical sciences, where a vast majority of scientific studies’ findings cannot be reproduced when the studies are repeated. Suggested explanations for the crisis include inappropriate or flawed study protocol design, mistakes made during data collection or analysis, and failure to report studies’ results without bias or omissions.
JoRD offers a solution to these concerns, through strongly promoting the adoption of ‘open science’ and ‘open data’ behaviours. Through rewarding scientists for high quality study design and conduct, we are taking the first step towards separating research study design and data acquisition from data analysis, in order to improve scientific quality overall.
By minimising the required effort and maximising the scientific reward, scientists are incentivised to publish their raw data in the journal. The use of the Arweave’s permanent, distributed data storage features guarantees reliable access to this vital scientific data for generations far into the future, with any forgery or censorship possible. This permanent storage capability means that future scientists and researchers will be able to re-analyse the data. These re-analyses provide an important check against ‘data fishing’, searching for significant results in a dataset regardless of the original hypotheses of the study. Additionally, Arweave’s scalability features guarantee that the journal’s database can grow to vast sizes, accommodating all future submissions.
Incentives and benefits of JoRD are fully detailed in the whitepaper, produced by our partners at Charité.
We hope that you will join us in our excitement about this momentous and innovative collaboration! We hope that this will be the first of many open science initiatives utilising the Arweave. We’re thrilled to push forward our shared mission of increased public access to uncensorable data and information through the creation of this journal, and hope you will join us on our journey.
If you’d like to get in touch with our team, or get involved with JoRD, just drop us an email at team@arweave.org — we’re always happy to discuss feedback and answer questions!
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