Hi all, seems like a great project - has anyone thought about how this could affect news publishing around the monetization space? How could it disrupt subscriptions for example?
I don’t think it would/could? Solid doesn’t involve itself with payment processing or allowing access to payment gated things. Sure, potentially someone could create a payment method that stores some sort of verifiable credential or token in a Solid pod, but that’s as far as it goes, I think?
How would you think it could impact monetization or subscriptions?
There has been recent articles talking of Solid in terms of Web3, but it’s important to clarify or restate that Solid isn’t at all related to Blockchain or Cryptocurrency technologies.
Solid does still have a lot to offer in the space of publications; and, in-particular re-empower a lot of smaller or independent publishing outlets that are currently struggling to compete with media giants; and also reduces the need for search engines like google as a middle-man for accessing their content (which over the last couple of years has caused some turbulence in the legislative space in Australia e.g. Google Search threatened to be removed in Australia over media bargaining code).
How? interoperability. One use-case of Solid is to allow independent publishers to put their articles in Solid Pods; and I can then view and browse through articles from any set of publishers that I am interested in using a Solid app for viewing News. Could they then require payment to give me read-access to the full news article? - sure. Is how I make that payment in the scope of the Solid Protocol? - no; but there is nothing stopping you from using an existing payment system such as debit, paypal, venmo etc.
An additional point I should make is that you could quite easily add some level of peer reviewing into the app you are using to view the news articles. For instance; you could “filter to only show articles that have been verified by 3 or more trusted experts in the field”. Could those trusted experts also require a small annual fee to give you access to the list of articles in their Pod that they have verified (or dispute) - sure! Again - we just use existing technologies to actually perform the transaction.
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We just released in Ghent a research paper on that topic with an open access version at: [2208.00665] Event Notifications in Value-Adding Networks . In this paper we make the case that in academic published the protocols (that also are available in Solid) could be disruptive.
All core functions of scholarly communication : registration of results (who was the first), certification (peer review, overlay journals), awareness (publication indexes) and archiving (keeping the scholarly record), could be implemented in a decentralized way.
And that is what is being done. We have created profile of the Linked Data Notification protocol (available in Solid) to express these scholarly (not monetary) values that can be added in a scholarly network: https://www.eventnotifications.net .
This protocol is implemented currently in the COAR Notify Initiative The COAR Notify Initiative – COAR . COAR is the confederation of open access repositories with 157 members world wide in academia, libraries, research institutes and government. COAR is working with a network of open access repositories and decentralized service providers for peer review, overlay journals and search indexes.
We in Ghent take the one step further can claim this can also be done in a very decentralized way using researcher pods: researchers that store and describe their scholalry record in their own Solid pod.
This would be very disruptive in the current academic publishing climate. Watch this video for more information about this vision: Scholarly Communication: Deconstruct & Decentralize? - YouTube
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