What are the Structured Commons?

The Structured Commons consist of a model for scholars to publish and interact with scientific work and a network of documents and digital objects structured and connected to each other using Structured Commons mechanisms.

The Structured Commons model consists of standards, methods and tools to:

• compute citable fingerprints for documents and digital objects;
• generate and verify certificates of existence;
• structure, and produce download links to durable archives of documents and collections;
• organize, validate and reward peer review between scholars;
• mine, index and query document metadata automatically.

An academic work or digital object published in the Structured Commons network becomes:

• independent: content is stored, indexed and distributed across the Internet, without requiring a single host organization or repository to support its existence in the long term.
• incorruptible: citations and links use fingerprints that "digitally signs" all documents; any post-publication alteration invalidate existing fingerprints.
• irrefutable: certificates of existence guarantee a document existed not later than a specific date, and multiple certificates can be added to a document over time.