CrimRxiv Consortium partners with Onboard.
CrimRxiv · 2025
CrimRxiv Consortium announces its partnership with Onboard, which helps organizations to meet their storage and compute needs with Arweave and AO.Arweave is a decentralized network for storing data permanently online.AO is its computing layer that allows anyone to run autonomous programs on top of permanent data.You can learn more about the partnership in the article below, adapted from the version published on X with a CC BY 4.0 License.CrimRxiv is an open-access hub and repository for criminology research.It hosts more than 4,000 publications, attracts over 1 million views per month, and supports about 80,000 monthly users.It is supported by CrimRxiv Consortium, an international network of 30 institutions led by the University of Manchester.CrimRxiv currently publishes on PubPub, but it is scheduled to shut down in 2027.The Consortium sought out a solution to ensure the repository's long-term preservation, accessibility, and independence.The challenge reflects a critical problem in modern academia: Academic repositories hold valuable research, including papers, datasets, and code that advance science and train AI models, yet this knowledge remains locked in centralized platforms, creating risks of paywalls, censorship, and data loss.With the sunsetting of PubPub, the Consortium aims to secure the future of CrimRxiv with a decentralized and permanent storage solution.Every paper, dataset, and metadata record must remain preserved, verifiable, and openly available to researchers, students, and policymakers.To achieve this goal, the Consortium is turning to Arweave.CrimRxiv's founder and associate director, Scott Jacques, explained, "A few months ago I did a deep dive into the options for permanently preserving our content.This led me to Arweave.It's a game-changing solution to sustainable and public storage.My bet is it becomes a staple of Web3 and DeSci." By backing-up CrimRxiv on Arweave, the Consortium ensures the content is:Realizing this vision requires the right infrastructure to make research discoverable, accessible, and usable in practice.This is where AR.IO comes in.It is a decentralized network that makes it easy for anyone to access, store, and retrieve permanent data and web apps on Arweave's blockchain, using gateway services and smart domains for a more reliable and censorship-resistant internet.AR.IO is developing an MVP that scrapes data from CrimRxiv's current platform, reformats it into a structured format, uploads it to Arweave, and publishes it through the Arweave Name System (ArNS).Key components Permanently preserved through decentralized storage.Verifiable and tamper-proof via Arweave's ANS-104 DataItem format.Accessible worldwide without reliance on a single institution or company.