Samenvatting

Names of group members: Tran Khanh Linh Nguyen (461345) – HBO ICT TI Samad Shaikh (444629) – HBO ICT SE Jeroen Stol (453483) – HBO ICT ITSM Jelle van der Weijden (440265) – International Business Dylan Severs (468038) – International Business Jarno van Leeuwen (463788) – Business Administration Milan Kok (469346) – Business Administration
Due to the increasing digitalization in the 21st century, the phenomenon to only publish scientific articles online is becoming more common. The debate on the consolidating publishing industry has been arising in the last years due to the high-profit margins that the big publishing companies are earning (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015). After analysing roughly 45 million papers over the period 1973 –2013, research proofs that the academic publishing industry is shifting to an oligopoly with a few publishers who publish over 50% of all published papers (Larivière, Haustein, & Mongeon, 2015). Not only do these big publishers earn revenues from the backs of writers, sometimes they also possess the copyrights of the published articles. Since the introduction of the open-access movement, it is becoming more common for publishers to request the execution of the authors ' copyright, which will be claimed by the publisher after the publication of the article (RUG, 2021). As this movement is influencing the market, more writers are considering other options. Although some writers can accept that the only important factor of publishing papers is the increasing h-index, others prefer lucrative writing and maintaining the copyrights of their publications. To stimulate that the copyrights and earnings stay with the author of the publication, our client asked us to develop BlockPub.