The blockchain can replace journals, RMIT’s Jason Potts and colleagues argue in a new article (in a journal).* “A journal is a self-constituted group, endeavouring to create new knowledge. In this sense, a journal is a club,” they write. And members of a research club can communicate with each other via blockchains.

But learning more about Potts and pals’ club concept isn’t that easy. Their ideas appear in this week’s issue of Prometheus, a journal published by Taylor and Francis. If you can’t access the article via your institution T&F will give you 24 hours access for $42.

Fortunately in April 2016 the authors placed a pre-press copy here, where they concluded; “it is foreseeable that an author could distribute a work through whatever means they feel is appropriate (for instance a university repository) and be assured that it possesses identifiers that prove the knowledge club (journal) has accepted the work. Those same identifiers could be used for searching, effectively bundling club knowledge outputs from across a distributed system. ” “The journal itself,” they proposed, “may not be necessary, reducing or eliminating production costs altogether.”

# Jason Potts, John Hartley (Curtin U), Lucy Montgomery (Curtin U), Cameron Neylon (Curtin) and Ellie Rennie (RMIT), “A journal is a club: a new economic model for scholarly publishing,” Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation