Intellart’s Technology Stack
Most people would agree that science accessibility is a net positive for society. With this in mind, we previously identified two important challenges the general population encounters within the existing academic knowledge dissemination landscape:
- Cost
- Knowledge gap
We also discussed how blockchain technology has the potential to overcome these limitations, owing to its transparent, efficient and inclusive nature. Our previous articles have mostly touched on the theoretical aspects of this issue and were more of a problem setting than an actual solution. In this short blog post, we enumerate the different components of our technology stack and their implications in solving these challenges.
We will start the descriptions at the end-product stage, and work our way up to the deepest parts of our infrastructure.
To solve for the knowledge gap conundrum, we developed PubWeave, an online platform for science publishing and dissemination. PubWeave allows users to publish blog posts, harnessing the power of a versatile editor that allows them to include tables, figures, lists, code and more general files. And when their blog articles are ready to start the process of becoming scientific articles, they can be converted into preprint drafts, where collaborators can be invited to edit the document in a symbiotic manner. We will be writing a whole article on this subject.
To solve for cost of accessing science, PubWeave will be fully integrated to the Cardano Blockchain to allow for a treasury system to distribute funds to reviewers and editors, thereby crafting the first blockchain-based scientific peer-review system! Everything will have to be open-access on PubWeave. More on that soon.
An Open Science Marketplace complements PubWeave by sharing the same Ruby on Rails backend and local PostgreSQL database (with Redis caching) as PubWeave for user account management. Its primary purpose is to allow authors to create Non-Fungible Tokens (NTFs) of their submitted scientific articles, thus allowing them to participate in a literal marketplace of ideas and discoveries. Fees generated from the transactions of those Open Science NFTs (osNFTs for short) will help fill PubWeave’s treasury, while allowing authors to support each other’s work and for interested parties (other users, granting agencies, etc.) to have the opportunity to support science they deem worthy of monetary compensation.
Both PubWeave and the Open Science Marketplace’s frontend are based on the React JavaScript library.
In order for these two platforms to communicate with the Cardano blockchain, a simple Flask/pyCardano-based API was developed, communicating with the cardano-node for off-chain interactions and on-chain transaction submissions, such as minting or transferring osNFTs. The osNFT miniting policy was generated using a Plutus smart contract developed in-house and currently lives on-chain. A simple frontend explorer was developed on top of this API module to interrogate the blockchain with extended capabilities compared to what is offered to PubWeave and the Open Science Marketplace.
Hopefully, this short overview was clear enough to give you an idea of how we are tackling the massive problem which is science availability, and what we are planning for the future. Many more articles will follow, with an individual emphasis on each of the tools that are mentioned here. Stay tuned!
