Advancing Open Science with Version Control and Blockchains

The scientific community is facing a crisis of reproducibility: confidence in scientific results is damaged by concerns regarding the integrity of experimental data and the analyses applied to that data. Experimental integrity can be compromised inadvertently when researchers overlook some important component of their experimental procedure, or intentionally by researchers or malicious third-parties who are biased towards ensuring a specific outcome of an experiment. The scientific community has pushed for "open science" to add transparency to the experimental process, asking researchers to publicly register their data sets and experimental procedures. We argue that the software engineering community can leverage its expertise in tracking traceability and provenance of source code and its related artifacts to simplify data management for scientists. Moreover, by leveraging smart contract and blockchain technologies, we believe that it is possible for such a system to guarantee end-to-end integrity of scientific data and results while supporting collaborative research.