 Ah, thanks, great. Yeah, thank you so much. Super happy to be here. And yeah, I remember very well talking with Sönke maybe three or four years ago. I don't know, do you remember Sönke about how crazy it would be to timestamp scientific publications or something. And it's amazing to see how far we have come since then. So it's really amazing. Sorry, what? I don't know, yeah, but really great, yeah. And yeah, as you maybe know, sometimes I prefer to frame it as, OK, it's an endeavor in moving science and research towards peer-to-peer. It's not only about blockchain. Blockchain is only one particular means in the space. But OK, let's have a closer look. So first, just a very few words about my employer, TIB. So in fact, maybe surprising, I'm a librarian, right? So TIB is the German National Library of Science and Technology, so they say, so they call it. But at the same time, we are also University of Hannover's University Library. And being this special library means that we have huge research and development departments. We have several professorships within our library, and so on. You can maybe imagine that. And sorry, I have to tell you a little bit about that just to frame it a little bit more. So for instance, a few years ago, TIB came up with the idea of data site. Who in this room knows about DOIs and data site? Do you know this? So OK, not everybody. So this was hugely important. This idea of applying a unique identifier not only to every publication, but to every data set. So to make raw data, raw research data, citable, referable, to have a description about every piece of research data. And so we kicked off this worldwide network of research data centers before it was cool. Nowadays, everybody is talking about research data and research data management. But back then, 10 years ago, this was new. And this spin-off, this TIB spin-off data site, we still host it and we take pride in that. And we continuously do new stuff and try new stuff. For instance, have a look at Generation R. This is a platform that my team just kicked off a few months ago, genr.eu. And that is a platform where we kind of bundle the discourse on open science in Europe. Or we try to do that at least. For instance, a few weeks ago, we ran a theme on decentralized web. And we had also contributions from some of the people who are actually sitting here. And we are leading this discussion on open science, decentralized web, and stuff. Or to name another thing, we have the AV portal, which is kind of a YouTube for science. But it does much more than YouTube. It does, for instance, it supports researchers by having an in-speech recognition of text so we can search in the actual words that are spoken during a presentation that we have as a video there. And then this speech is tagged, matched with DBPDR terms and so on. OK, just have a look for yourself if you'd like to. So now a little bit closer to where I'm coming from. As I mentioned, I have a little bit of a background in social sciences. I'm educated as an academic librarian and worked in this field for several years. And five years ago, I kicked off this team in TIB's research and development department. And what are we actually doing there? So what I'm concerned with is, on the one hand, just to give you two examples, we made this approach of, did anybody of you hear about current research information systems, like PURE or something? Yeah, a few people know this. So this is a huge development in the recent years. So universities now have databases where they try to capture all of the research outcome of their researcher. So you have researcher profiles there. You can look for how expertise, developments, and departments, you can compare by numbers the outcome, and so on, and so on. And until recently, until five years ago or so, nobody in Germany knew that there's an open source, linked open data approach to this, Vivo. And so we committed to that. And by now, today, we have 15, around 15 research institutions in Germany who use Vivo for monitoring research output in some way. From my perspective, this is huge. And so if your research institution is considering to trust Elsevier with their research output and to let them manage this with their offering in this field, like with Skyvel or PURE or so, think again and consider instead using this approach. Vivo, it's a worldwide alliance taking care of this piece of free and open source software, and you can use this instead. And to give just another example, so research infrastructure, the technical conceptual thing is only one thing. As you all know, the change towards open science is more like a cultural change. It's a change in attitude. It's about knowledge, and it's about what researchers know about this environment, and what is possible, and what are the constraints. And so we take care for this very much. And to give you one example, we had a books brand in February this year, where we invited 15 experts from all over Europe, from 10 different countries, in fact. And within a week, we guided them through the process of writing a book. So we came up with this Foster Open Science Training Handbook. And this is written by people who actually do workshop seminars on stuff like open science and data science and so on. Because we need to cultivate and grow that knowledge. This is a fast-moving target, and you have to take care for that, and we actually do that. So have a look at this book if you plan your next open science webinar workshop or whatever. And of course, it's a CC0 license, so it's absolutely open, and it's on GitHub and everything, what you can imagine. But OK, let's move closer to the actual topic of today. Sorry for the bragging, but I need to do that a little bit. So a few months ago, we, STIB, acquired together with strong partners from all over Europe our first Horizon 2020 funding in this particular field. And this is a project led by the National Technical University of Greece in Athens, which is called QualiChain. And QualiChain is concerned with blockchain-backed educational certificates and higher education. So some of you may know that already since two and a half years ago or so, there are actual institutions who are doing this. So they notarize their diplomas and so on, all kinds of certificates using blockchains. And what is new about this project, which is about to start next year, is that we want to create a fuller, to a fuller extent, a landscape around this. So for instance, we have public employers in mind. It should be easy for them to receive and check those certificates and make a smarter use of them and so on. And please look up, for instance, what the Open University in the UK is doing in this field since more than two years with their open blockchain. It's very well explained on their page. I can really recommend that. And this is always inspiring, because higher education is so close to what we do, right? To research. And they are actually maybe one or two steps ahead, so we should learn from them and take their building blocks and build upon them. I will go into that a little bit more later. And OK, what I think and what maybe many of you in this room is not particularly new now, this idea is that this kind of approach will set new standards in research as well. At least I hope so. It has this potential. And this means that researchers will be allowed to directly own their identity, without detours, without having necessarily to rely on someone's platform. And this is at the very core from my perspective at what is possible with blockchain and to have less delegated trust and more permissionless protocols. Like we have in other spaces already. And you know what kind of innovation the invention of the World Wide Web set off in the beginning of the 1990s. And this was due to the fact that this was permissionless protocols. And now we have permissionless protocols allowing for permissionless innovations and value transfer as well. This is fantastic. And it will shift information markets to say the least. Or at least there's a good hope, a good perspective for that. So yes, but this is not particularly new. So let's have a little bit of a closer look. What does it mean to apply this blockchain approach to educational certificates and higher education? And it's kind of funny because here in the front row we have Ursula Georgi, professor from University of Applied Science in Cologne. And we just recently had a bachelor's student writing his thesis about exactly this. And this was really fun, interesting experience. So this will be a German language, but I hope he will publish it. So he compares different approaches for digital educational certificates. So what is the interesting thing now with this block search approach? So when MIT Media Lab came up with this in 2016, they coined this open standard, which they call block search. And the idea is here that you set up your note on a peer to peer public blockchain. And then you ask somebody who gave you the certificate to verify the claim that you got the certificate. And of course, this happens on chain. And so the interesting thing about this is from the moment on when you receive this verification of your claim, so verifiable claim is also a community draft for a W3C standard by now. I will mention this later again. Then you are much more independent with this, right? So if it turns out, let's take, for example, Malta. For some reason, I never understand this, but for some reason I mentioned this, I think, yesterday also. You have these many language schools in Malta, right? But what happens if one of these schools goes down the drain? Or what happens in the case of Hungary? This is not made up, but this happened only a few weeks ago. So the government of Hungary decided that there is some particular university of the Open Science Institutes that they don't like, and they force them out of the country. So what do you do when you are an alumni of this institution and you rely on your future employees that they believe you, that you have your diploma from there? But it's not there anymore. Yes, they move to another country. So what do you do? And here, blockchain delivers really an elegant, nice solution. So you have your wallet app, and you own this certification of your diploma or whatever. And it's up to you to choose in which way and to who you deliver that proof that you got that certificate. This is what you do, for instance, using if you want to zero knowledge proofs so that you know that only one particular aspect, or only one diploma of many diplomas, you show if you want to a particular employee, you don't need to show this in public, but you have the proof out there. And it's impossible to remove it or to strip you of that thing that you achieved. So let's move to a slightly different building block, or what I see as a building block. So some of you may know this approach to peer to peer, to this peer to peer approach and science funding. I guess that Ulrich Dirnagel in his keynote yesterday mentioned that. So what would you guess? How often is Johann Bollen in this paper mentioning crypto economics or blockchain? What is your guess? Any number? Zero, right? OK, you know that? OK, so zero. That's an interesting thing. So this is completely not about crypto economics, but about a good idea. And that is to introduce a new concept in research funding. But actually, with crypto economics, we have the means to realize such an idea, to make it a reality in a very efficient and lean way. So the idea is here to have a basic funding for every researcher and to force every researcher to redistribute a tiny slice of their own funding to other researchers. And with crypto economics, we can actually do that. And I point you to this because I think we don't have to constantly reinvent the wheel, but instead we should try to connect the dots, the building blocks that are already out there. This is a great idea. And actually, Johann Bohlen ran a simulation on that. And he kind of showed already that this has certain advantages over the traditional way of research funding. So then we already are in this phase that we do not only have nice ideas and some implementation of ideas, but also more generalized concepts that we have as standards. For instance, we have concepts like self-sovereign identity. If you are not familiar with the term yet, but it was mentioned already yesterday, look it up. Christopher Allen wrote a fantastic blog posting on this, kicked off this development, but also Charmin Foschengier. Now you have this W3C community draft on that. And the basic idea again, but more generalized, is what I already told you from the educational certificates example. So a verifiable claim is when you set up your note on a blockchain. And then you can ask virtually anybody to verify virtually anything about you. And you can think about lots of the transactions that happen in research, like peer review, for instance, just any kind of assessment as such a transaction. But in this case, in this scenario, it would be owned by those who own their note on a blockchain. And so the idea here is that we have this already in place. We have standards that make sure that this is not just out there as some implementation on one particular blockchain, but it's like you have the language that tells you what what happens there, independent of the programming language or the framework or the blockchain where you implement this actually. And you have working examples for that in the wild. So this is virtually everything we need. And I think, again, we need to connect the dots. For instance, we have already great standards describing how we can attribute, how somebody contributed to some piece of research. We have a vocabulary in place to describe things like peer review or other forms of research assessment. So if we wonder how to have a machine-readable, executable plan for blockchain-based research funding, we already have all the building blocks for that there. So what we need to do next, from my perspective, is to integrate this and connect these dots. So for instance, we would need to have a certain way to speak about how a certain type of research funder makes use of a certain attribution to execute their funding on this, right? So that they can just press a button, hit the button, and decide, OK, here we go. We take care that somebody who, yeah, let's take, for instance, you are a software developer and you developed a certain software library that is, again and again, used in certain pieces of software. You could use this transitive credit approach from Daniel Katz. Have a look at this, this is very interesting. And based on this, you could make sure that a research funder could indirectly fund this kind of software development, right? So you would have a machine-executable research funding plan for this kind of software development. And we have all of the building blocks there. And we should take care that we target this waste of the hourglass, right? So it should be, we should formulate this idea independent from the blockchain where this is implemented in, or some certain programming language. And it should also be independent from what research funders then would actually make of it. You get my point, right? So this is the waste of the hourglass. We should make highly reusable standards and vocabularies to make sure that we are on the same page here and we have reusable concepts for things like this. So towards the end, I thought I come up with a wish list for the Blockchain for Open Science community. And let's discuss this a little bit maybe if we have time for that. So one thing is, OK, we have competition in this room. And this is not bad, right? And we will have certainly some duplication of efforts due to this as well. So there are similar projects here in this room. And we will hardly avoid this, right? We will sometimes reinvent the wheel. But in order to succeed, to make this whole field succeed together, I guess it's super important to agree on some standards. And this takes time and work. We need some at least loose consensus on vocabularies and patterns. Again, that's the waste of the hourglass. We need to make sure that we can talk about ways of research funding in consistent ways and to connect it to ways of assessing research where we already have this vocabulary in place. And this takes time to develop standards like W3C standards or with other organizations. But even as a startup, even as an ICO, you should set aside some time and something of your energy to take part in those activities. I guess we need this, really. And then the other thing, this might sound like, OK, not so surprising. But again, we should apply open science standards to what we develop here. And by that, I mean we should develop open source software. We should, OK, sometimes white papers are interesting. They can be the starter of a certain discussion. They can be inspiring and so on. But more important is to build things in the open, be open for contributions, and try things in public. And I guess this is tried and tested. This works in open source. This works in open science. Let's apply this as a best practice here in our field as well as often as possible. And then last point, and I'm not sure about this. This is just a suggestion or thinking out loud. I wonder if there are some things. I mean, if we have this common goal to make blockchains a mean for the advancement of open science and more agency for researchers and so on. Maybe we should even have some organization around this to make sure that we take care for our advancements and that we talk with one voice to the public about this, maybe, because we have good examples how this works out there from both fields, from the open science world and from the blockchain world, thinking about Spark and its role in advancing open access in the early days and still, or also thinking about the Ethereum Foundation's role now, think about what we heard from DEF CON 4 just a few days ago. So the Ethereum Foundation turns out to be really helpful for this whole community, which was their diverse projects and helping them to develop new standards and setting the agenda for advancing Ethereum. And maybe, I don't know, maybe we need something like this for blockchain for open science as well. And thanks to Zürnke, we already have an organization around this. Maybe this could be a starting point for that. I don't know. Let's discuss this. Yeah, so that's all. Thank you so much, Lambert. This was really great, and especially the last thoughts I can just underline. We need to do this in the open. We have to do this together. And we have to unite to bring this further. Other questions? Then maybe I would like to ask one. The quality chain that you mentioned before, what is the timeline there? And is it around so far? Is it widely used? And what are your wishes maybe in that direction? Very good question. So the Open University in UK that I mentioned are one of the partners of this project. So I guess this is one of our most important building blocks that we already have. And what we are missing yet is an instrumentation for people who then should make use of these certificates, like, for instance, public employers. We focus on them in particular in this project. And in different countries with different roles and so on. And we also make sure that, OK, so far this is established somewhat to some extent in higher education. But what about professional qualifications that you earn while working in some company? We don't have proper tools for this yet. So this is the kind of things that we look at. And we will certainly have to make sure that we come up with good standards and vocabularies there as well, that's for sure. And join us if you like to. Over there is one question. Wait a second until we have the mic, please. You have already. Great, thanks. Thank you very much. That was a really great presentation. I wanted to ask you about this scientific agency that would be funding research. Has anybody tried to put that in practice? What would be your point of view? How far away are we from making it a reality? Do we have the right resources? You are talking about more agency for researchers? For funding. So funding research outputs. Yeah, that's a very good question. So yeah, this is something that concerns me very much in the last few weeks and months. And I guess we need to have this conversation with funding agencies. So far I don't know much about this in this area. Whenever I have the opportunity to speak with people from progressive funding agencies like Wellcome Trust or Stifterfaband in Germany, they always tell me, yes, we are absolutely interested. But we need to further this conversation and make sure that we agree on certain standards and so on. But this is still to be done. Absolutely. Important question, yeah. OK, we're running a little bit out of time, but maybe we have one final question. Otherwise we. And of course, next to research funding agencies, there might be other, since it's now much easier, thanks to blockchain, to have microfunding. Things like what science data is doing now without blockchain and so on. We will have to look out for other types of funders and funding as well. This is exciting. OK, thank you so much.