7.3 LibChain – Open, Verifiable and Anonymous Access Management

Cabello, Juan; Janacik, Peter; Janßen, Gerrit; Jungnickel, Tim; Mühle, Alexander
2017 Zenodo  
Current contracts between academic publishers and research libraries are based on subscription models, granting patrons of a library almost unlimited access the digital publications of a single publisher. Unfortunately, pricing models often do not correspond to the usage of the publishers' content. As a consequence, several German research libraries canceled their subscription of Elsevier's publications. In this paper, we present LibChain, a decentral, verifiable and anonymous access management
more » ... based on blockchain technology. LibChain envisions a novel procedure to access digital media from different publishers through a library. With the LibChain service, the library stores every request of a digital publication directly in the blockchain, making it an anonymous but verifiable source for publishers to provide access to the user. The decentral blockchain architecture enables new access models for digital media and allows fairer and more accurate pricing models based on the usage. LibChain unleashes the full potential if multiple libraries cooperate to create trustworthy usage metrics or share the access to digital publications. As a design principle of the underlying blockchain technology, no mutual trust is required to generate verifiable transactions. We explicitly promote open access publications in our system design by providing verifiable usage metrics among distributed libraries and enable anonymous compensations and donations. In addition to a fully described programming interface for established publishers, we provide a standalone toolkit for conferences and smaller research institutes. Hence, small groups of authors can easily contribute to the LibChain universe and act as their own open access publisher. The implementation of our research prototype is based on the open source blockchain framework ethereum. The key advantages of LibChain are: First, it provides a distributed, failure tolerant mechanism for free, open and anonymous access to content that can be used out-of-the-box by anyone. Second, it is [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.3610229 fatcat:cphgryivareixfedpcwwk7icdi