SciChain: Science on the Blockchain

Motivation

Science is the core of the modern society, bringing us a deeper understanding of the world and providing us with extraordinary tools to cure diseases, allow fast transportation and communication. We cannot put Science into words, but we can try to make the processes behind it even better, faster and more transparent.

Our team includes experienced researchers on Computer Science, Engineering and Material Physics fields, and we want to give Science a better tool for dealing with one of its most important feature: the peer-review system.

Perhaps not so many people know that, for a scientific study to be properly “accepted” as “true”, it is commonly required for it to pass the peer-review system, where unknown colleagues of the same field judge the article methodology, background and results. If it passes peer-review and is published in a qualified journal, the study is considered valid and is referenced in future studies. And the chain goes on…

In order to achieve a truly transparent process in peer-review, we propose SciChain. As SciChain is build on top of NEO Blockchain (a blockchain can be seen as a public database where the defined rules are always respected), there will be no way of “cheating” in peer-review, for example, indicating known friends as reviewers, breaking the double-blind principle (what means that both and the author and reviewer must not know who is each other),

and many other bad actions that hurt our precious Science :’(

One the many flaws in scientific studies is also related to low reproducibility of scientific studies, since few journals are available and they usually “accept” only “new” results. Most of these journals require authors to pay for the download of each publication, what strongly undermines the capacity of the researchers (mainly in underdeveloped countries) to be updated with newer discoveries.

We intend to remediate these problems by providing a free scientific pool of journals and reviewers directly in a blockchain.

Future works

There are many future works for SciChain, and we will continue to develop them, as the idea emerged in casual talks in early February 2017. We believe this project can be the start of a revolution in the way we do science, and perhaps this can bring birth to many other similar projects that will fulfill the purpose of bringing a more transparent science.

Roadmap

  • Integrating basic smart contract operations, browsers light wallets, with scichain.org website
  • Improving endorsement calculations strategies of the smart contract
  • Developing zero-knowledge proofs for private interaction with SciChain smart contract
  • Integrating cryptographic end-to-end compilations in website
  • Integrating SmartRules smart contract with Dynamic Invoke, to allow remote/personalized judgments

Supporters

City of Zion, throughout the 2nd dapp competition

NeoResearch, by providing support for us to develop our dapp

Getting more information

More information for the many other operations available can be found in SciChain documentation at GitHub and for a brief guide check How to Use.

We are proudly MIT licensed and expect collaborations, join our team, ideas or donations to keep the project going :)

Rewards/donation can be given to: AdfJSyxgpTZTGSWCnApWPA49hQG7ANVdht