What flowers can bloom in a green open access landscape? Imaging a future with BitViews

Abstract

BitViews is a blockchain application that collects, validates, and aggregates worldwide online usage data of author’s approved manuscripts (AAMs) deposited in Open Access Institutional Repositories. It creates a free public ledger of usage events that allows anyone to see which research outputs have been accessed, where, and when, thus providing the raw material to construct discipline- and region-specific non-citation based measures of research impact. BitViews’ short-term implications include: 1. The re-alignment of journal impact measures (from citations to usage); 2. Changed patterns in the production of research articles (towards high-usage topics); 3. Creation of new networks of research collaboration; 4. Enhanced opportunity for open data sharing. BitViews’ long-term effects are transformative. Because BitViews promotes the “unbundling” of AAMs from published articles, it endows AAMs with independent value. Two disruptive consequences follow: the very concept of APCs is undermined and the conditions are created for the academy to regain ownership of peer review. Relegating commercial publishers to the role of providers of post-AAM services, huge resources will be released. As soon as AAMs are de‐coupled from articles, the same process and infrastructure can be applied to research monographs, thereby completing the cycle of Open Access to the whole production of knowledge.