The sustainability, preservation, and long-term accessibility of research data is a growing concern for a number of academic institutions. Several centralized research data storage/hosting solutions are currently available to mitigate this issue, where research data archival and access is guaranteed by single centralized entities, often hosting research data for several academic institutions.
In contrast, a truly decentralized solution offers the benefits of removing the need to rely on a small number of centralized entities to store and access these data: this brings about several benefits such as censorship resistance, immutability of the data, the removal of a single point of failure, and the removal of a “direct” need to maintain the actual infrastructure necessary for long-term storage and availability.
In this context, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science explores the development of a prototype that would permit the storage of research data in a truly decentralized way.