Structured Commons

Mission statement

The goal of Structured Commons is to optimize dissemination and reuse of scientific work, with four sub-goals:

1. make dissemination faster;
2. promote open peer review;
3. lower the cost of publishing, dissemination and access;
4. guarantee the persistence and consistency of the citation network over the very long term (50+ years).

The Structured Commons network and model complement public repositories like arXiv, Wikimedia Commons, the Common Crawl, Web Data Commons, etc., and overlay them with new services for authors and scholars:

• to structure digital documents and citations and equip them for very long term persistence;
• to support distributed, independent and transparent ("open") peer review of scholarly work;
• to provide transparent evaluation methods for scientific works and researchers, including ranking and filtering of "top" publications, based on public evidence.

See the specification document SCEP 100 and the TRUST presentation slides for an overview of how this is achieved.

The Structured Commons publication channels can operate side by side with existing publishers (of journals & conference proceedings), but they also enable alternate business models that can compete effectively with the pre-Internet publishing industry.