Aletheia

Editor’s Note: Aletheia originated in Brisbane, Australia when Kade Morton attended several blockchain meetups and after watching the film, “The Internet’s Own Boy, The Story of Aaron Swartz.” Kade said from that moment, ” The two collided and started working on Aletheia.“

In short, Aletheia is software for getting science published and into the hands of everyone, for free. It’s a decentralised and distributed database used as a publishing platform for scientific research.

For a more in depth explanation, Aletheia is an Ethereum Blockchain application utilising IPFS for decentralised storage that anyone can upload documents to, download documents from, that also handles the academic peer review process. The application runs on individual PCs, all forming part of the IPFS database. This gives us an open source platform that cannot be bought out by the large publishers (and any derivatives of the platform source code must also be open source) that should also be hard to take down due to database nodes being spread across the globe in multiple legal jurisdictions. Aletheia is designed to be a resilient platform run transparently by the community, not some black box corporation or editorial board, meaning all users can see the decisions Aletheia is making and have a stake in that decision making process if they so desire. By this nature, Aletheia is decentralised, it has no key person risk. Should the core group who invented Aletheia disappear Aletheia won’t cease to exist, it will continue to be run by the community. The community moderates content through various mechanisms (peer review, reputation scores etc.,) to ensure quality of content.