Aletheia: publish research for free, access research for free

Authors & Affiliation

Kade Morton (EPrints) and Lisa Matthias

Abstract

Aletheia is a resilient and open publishing platform that ensures everyone with an internet connection has access to research, providing an alternative to paywalled journals and fee charging open access journals. It is a decentralised and distributed database for publishing scientific research and datasets. The database itself is managed as a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO) run by users.
Academic paywalls are discriminatory to those who cannot pay for research and serve no purpose past making money for publishers as research is usually covered through funding from governments and other bodies. Couple this with the fact that the companies managing paywalls don’t add any significant value to the publishing process that couldn’t be added by other parties, and you have a clear use case for technology to step into the publishing process to build a better system.

Aletheia proposes a system that can store papers and datasets in a secure and resilient manner, free for all to access. While traditional publishers only allow access to a highly exclusive and privileged group through a system of regressive barriers, Aletheia makes access universal. Rather than a website that has a single point of failure, the site itself or the server that hosts the site, Aletheia is a client that a user can download and install to streamline the publishing process.

Aletheia is open source, the source code being released under a GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, meaning the platform and its contents are locked open. Aletheia cannot be bought out neither can its contents be placed behind a paywall.