PubWeave: An academic ecosystem

[IMPACT]

When we think of centralized middle-men with big industrial profit margins profiting from content creators, we remember the music industry. When we think of censorship by a central authority, social media comes to mind. When we think of self-custody, we might remember our money sitting in the bank. Thankfully, all of these issues can find solutions using blockchain technology. What we rarely think about though, is scientific content that is ultra-centralized, censorship-prone, and held by a custodian.

Big journals are to scientific articles what banks are to money. You can technically profit from your scientific articles or keep them in your custody, but you wouldn't, because there is no infrastructure that allows those things.

PubWeave is a full-stack decentralized peer-review academic ecosystem that wants the content creator (author writing scientific articles) to retain ownership from their work and make it freely accessible to the public as should be.

This project might sound similar to our OpenScience NFT Marketplace, which was funded in Funds 6 and 7, but is very different in reality. In a nutshell, the osNFT marketplace would allow the author to associate an NFT to their peer-reviewed academic article, but would be completely separate from the whole process of reviewing a scientific paper, editing it or publishing it to a journal.

PubWeave wants to do just that.

To those unfamiliar with the process: publishing a peer-reviewed scientific article always costs money, either to publish in open-access (3000+ $) or to read (rent for 10-20$ per paper or ~30$ to buy). Profit margins from academic journals can go up to 40% for research that was funded by public money. What is more striking is this sentence from an article that did "A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry": "two of the most important inputs to the production of a journal – the articles themselves and editorial review – are provided virtually free of charge to the publishers". The argument here is that journals provide value mainly through editing and publishing.

A simple 'cut-the-middleman' scenario here would automatically reduce around 40% of the cost, if not more, due to unnecessary administrative work. Moreover, if you include some strategic smart-contract enabled game theory design, we might reduce the costs to 0. How is this possible?

Offsetting the costs of editing and publishing would be possible under 3 scenarios:

Grants.
A pay-per-view model.
A treasury.

Using grants to achieve our goal of free open publishing might help at first, but the system needs to be self-sufficient.

A pay-per-view model would theoretically work, as the reader would only pay a very small amount to interact with the paper, but might be complicated in practice, and people might not like the idea enough to try and install a wallet that would get siphoned as they scroll through the website.

A treasury would be the way to go. It could be filled in 2 ways:

A model where the 'rich' labs pay a premium and the 'poorer' labs get an exemption.
An external system linked to the treasury that fills it automatically.

The first strategy is sometimes used by open access academic journals, such as PLOS, and is not a bad idea to default to if the second strategy fails.

The second strategy is where the game theory comes into play. We mentioned before our OpenScience NFT Marketplace. This marketplace would be connected to PubWeave's treasury and each trade would generate a trade fee going straight to the treasury. The more the marketplace is used, the faster the treasury is filled. How do we ensure that the marketplace will create enough revenues to fill the treasury? By incentivizing token holders. If we set a rule where token holders of PubWeave would receive dividends if and only if the treasury has a certain amount inside it, then PubWeave's token holders would become incentivized to work towards filling the treasury as fast as possible, thus ensuring that the open science process continues to operate smoothly. A DAO, which we call PanDAO, would contain the necessary elements for a successful governance of this system.

PubWeave's UI is being built on Arweave, a decentralized data solution network. Our MVP will authenticates users using the Finnie wallet and has an upload function to Arweave and a simple gallery view which can be found here: <https://github.com/Intellart/pubweave-auth>.

An academic portal for peer-review publishing is not new, but a decentralized, permissionless and censorship-resistant portal of this kind is. Building this system would arguably be a great catalyst for helping establish Cardano as the blockchain of choice for building world-changing applications. It would undeniably help onboard new people to Cardano who would have much to offer, as they would be mostly academics or science-inclined at the very least.

For a project this size, the main challenge is being able to deliver, frankly. The scope is big and the plan is ambitious, but the growth we have seen over the past few months and the support from both the Cardano and Arweave communities is very encouraging. As you can see from this proposal, many parts of PubWeave require heavy infrastructure, which is partly why we are spreading our projects out into many different categories: PanDAO, OpenScience Marketplace and PubWeave (see final section for more details). Each of these projects stands on its own, but together they create the final vision we have for our ecosystem. We like to view it as a big puzzle which gets constructed one part at a time.

In the unfortunate event that any of those projects fails for any reason, it would not take away anything from the others. Those projects were designed to be complimentary but independent. But to us, the various collaborations we have had and continue to have and the trust of the Cardano community are an indication that we are on the right track.

[FEASIBILITY]

3 months

Bridge the decentralized PubWeave UI to the Cardano blockchain.
Testing the platform with scientific articles to upload is possible.
More than 10 potential researchers interested in testing.

6 months

PubWeave is used as a preprint server for scientific articles.
More than 10 potential reviewers signed up.
More than 100 preprint articles published.
The UI is on track for full decentralization.

12 months

The UI is fully decentralized.
More than 1000 preprint articles published.
Establishment of editorial board.
More than 50 potential reviewers signed up.
Gathering feedback and iterating with enhancements.

We have been fairly conservative in previous funds regarding our hourly wages. However, now that we have started collaborating with at least two software development companies we were made a bit more aware of the higher nature of the costs associated with this kind of development. We have thus increased the hourly rate by 10-15 % and reduced the number of weeks of work to keep the funds we ask for reasonable with regard to the challenge's available funds. We always make sure not to exceed 10-12% of the challenge's funds. This number includes all submissions in a single challenge, if applicable.

Plutus smart contract engineering

80$/hour x 40h/week x 12 weeks (4 months) = 38,400 $

SmartWeave smart contract engineering

65$/hour x 40h/week x 4 weeks (1 month) = 10,400 $

UI/UX development

50$/hour x 40h/week x 20 weeks (5 months) = 40,000 $

Backend development

50$/hour x 40h/week x 20 weeks (5 months) = 40,000 $

Total = 128,800 $

Core team:

Albert Feghaly: Project leader and blockchain developer (Plutus smart contracts).
Louis Gendron: Web and blockchain developer (Arweave NFT data storage and permaweb hosting).
Jordan Quenneville: Backend developer.
Jack Bauer: Science and art communicator, osNFT and logo design.
Yahya Benslimane: Networking coordinator within the academic world.

Advisors:

Roger Palou: Academic advisor.
Tariq Daouda: Infrastructure and AI expert.
Maude Dumont-Lagacé: Scientific advisor and art/design expert.

More information about the team can be found at <https://intellart.ca/#/team>

Additionally, because this project is deeply connected with Arweave's architecture, we have been in contact with their team, more specifically Arweave's Program Manager and Developer Relations, Jesse Pariselli, who invited us to talk about PubWeave during Arweave's Open Web Foundry 5, Community Spotlight #5 which is available on YouTube.

Here is the link for those interested. PubWeave's presentation starts at minute 30:30.

<https://www.youtube.com/embed/R9pP08sRWQI?start=1830>

[AUDITABILITY]

Our project spans 2 amazing communities, Cardano and Arweave, and we are active in both of them. We are a fairly visible and public team as you can see in the Youtube video down below. Moreover, our ethos is decentralization and permisionlessess, meaning that our efforts will always be put forward towards transparency, openness and collaboration. Our code will be public, so that the community can follow our progress and interact with us. A big section of our work includes building a website for scientific publications, which can be hard to audit. However, we will focus on building it incrementally and pushing modifications as frequently as possible.

Some quantifiable indicators include:

Commits made to GitHub.
Public presentations from our team, as we will need to increase awareness for this project to succeed.
Number of academics/institutions expressing interest in our platform.

You can find/reach us at:

https://intellart.ca
<https://github.com/intellart>

Weekly updates are and will continue to be pushed to <https://intellart.ca/#/weeklyUpdate> in a very succinct manner to allow for fast progress tracking and auditability. Moreover, we have started writing short blog articles on https://intellart.medium.com to let the community in on our successes, struggles and evolution.

A sneak-peek into an ideal future (say, 2 years) would show a platform which has enough funds in its treasury to finance all scientific publications for the next 10 years. Academic institutions are starting to collaborate with us, and some idealistic young researchers are publishing with us. Our editorial board is growing and the peer-review system is evolving.

More on the medium term, we will have decentralized most of our UI on Arweave and most interactions are happening on-chain on Cardano. Users can link their address to publications they own/follow and a network of DIDs is starting to take shape.

On the shorter term, users and authors will be uploading their open-source scientific articles as a pre-print to test out the platform, and it starts gaining traction.

This proposal is part of a broader ecosystem which was kickstarted with the success of our Fund 6 'Open Science NFT' proposal, which continued with a success in Fund 7 (1st place in dApps and Integrations!) and hopefully in the current Fund 8 as well (<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400474>).

It also build upon very crucial infrastructure which is being undertaken by our 'PanDAO' suite of tools, also successful in Fund 7. Two more PanDAO proposals are submitted in Fund 8 (<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400494> and <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400498>) that aim to build the rest of the infrastructure needed for PubWeave to attain its full potential: A truly decentralized, censorship-resistent and permissionless peer-review ecosystem armed with a treasury to fund open access scientific articles.

So go vote for us in our other proposals if you believe we're doing something good :)

Here is the list of all our previously funded proposals:

[Fund 6] osNFTs for science popularization: <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/369965>.

[Fund 7] OpenScienceNFT Marketplace: <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384826>.

[Fund 7] PanDAO: Focus on interoperability: <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384816>.

bookmarked!