Cambridge, MA and Salt Lake City, June 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ARTiFACTS, creator of the world’s first blockchain-based platform for scholarly research, and the Sovrin Foundation, the international non-profit dedicated to providing self-sovereign digital identity for all, announced the addition of ARTiFACTS as a Steward of the Sovrin Network. As a Steward, ARTiFACTS will collaborate with other Sovrin Stewards and members of the scholarly research community to leverage the foundation’s digital identity protocol.
The Sovrin Foundation operates as a global public utility, designed to provide portable, private and trustworthy identity certifications for every entity on the Internet. Along with other Stewards, ARTiFACTS will integrate with this self-sovereign identity network, which uses distributed ledger technology to enable the secure exchange of cryptographically-signed credentials to prove the digital identity information in the identity owner’s possession. By applying this new, innovative approach, the collaborative effort will address long-standing challenges in scholarly communications to ensure the correct researcher receives timely credit for her or his contributions.
“ARTiFACTS is squarely focused on providing full transparency into the scholarly research workflow by supporting an unbreakable, un-hackable digital chain of record for all research contributions. Certifying an author’s identity is a big part of that equation,” said ARTiFACTS President and Co-Founder Courtney Morris. “By enabling direct linkages from our platform to the Sovrin Network, and working with existing industry standards to help build a bridge to blockchain-based certifications, we hope to play a key role in bringing certainty and simplicity to author identity.
The focus of the ARTiFACTS collaboration with the Sovrin Foundation is on partnering with existing identifier standards, such as ORCID and its over 4.7 million researchers who have obtained identifiers from this essential service for the scholarly community, to support author identity verification. Through its work as a Sovrin Steward, ARTiFACTS will enable direct connectivity to the Sovrin Network to ensure that ORCID record holders can certify their identity.
“We believe that researchers should have the option to certify their identity and value the opportunity to collaborate with ARTiFACTS and Sovrin on connecting such certifications to a researchers ORCID record,” said ORCID Executive Director, Laure Haak. “As blockchain-based scholarly research platforms become a significant presence in the research workflow, it will be critical that these standards are interoperable and we look forward to working closely with ARTiFACTS and others to accomplish this shared goal.”
“Research generated at academic institutions and research organizations is a primary driver of innovation and economic advancement around the world,” said Sovrin Foundation Chairman Phillip Windley, PhD. “In turn, trustworthy, portable and immutable attribution of the source of scholarly work keeps this system working, and Sovrin technology is perfectly suited to this application. This collaboration with ARTiFACTS and its coordination with the ORCID standard identifier for researchers is thrilling and will yield immediate benefits.”
For more information on the ARTiFACTS platform, visit artifacts.ai. For more information on the Sovrin Foundation, visit Sovrin.org. For more information on ORCID, visit ORCID.org
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About ARTiFACTS
ARTiFACTS provides a user-friendly platform, purpose built for academic and scientific research that leverages blockchain technology. Researchers can record a valid and immutable chain of records in real-time, from the earliest stages of research for all research artifacts, including citing/attribution transactions. While today’s digital scholarship merely creates linkages among an artificially narrowed subset of indexed publications long after discoveries are made, ARTiFACTS focuses on capturing and linking knowledge from its initial ideation throughout the research process to informal and formal dissemination. By using the ARTiFACTS platform, researchers will be able to immutably prove ownership and existence of novel work, expand access to their research artifacts, provide and receive real-time attribution for novel work and more comprehensively and rapidly build and demonstrate their body of scholarly contributions.
To learn more, visit us at artifacts.ai and follow us on Twitter @ARTiFACTS_ai.
About the Sovrin Foundation
The international, non-profit Sovrin Foundation is governed by a constitutional Trust Framework that ensures its independence from government or industry influence and codifies its dedication to providing self-sovereign digital identity for all. The Sovrin network is operated by independent stewards and uses the power of a hybrid distributed ledger as a fast, private and secure framework for providing every person, organization, and connected device a permanent identity with which to transact online and operate securely in everyday life. Learn more about the Trust Framework underlying the Sovrin network here.
About ORCID
ORCID’s vision is a world where all who participate in research and innovation, from imagining to building and managing, are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions across disciplines, and borders, and time. ORCID provides an identifier for individuals to use with their name as they engage in research and innovation activities. We provide open tools that enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and affiliations. We provide this service to help people find information and to simplify reporting and analysis.
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