Open Science Marketplace: Bridging Two Worlds
When I visit a museum, I focus on the technique, the interplay of shadows, and discerning the direction of light within the depicted scenes. Some individuals might exclusively appreciate the artistic appeal of the painting, while others take pleasure in pieces representing historical events and evaluating the accuracy of the representation. Regardless of the reason, we enjoy museums because they connect with our interests, our desires.
But how can science connect with our interests? To many, science is a tool, to others, science can answer questions, and for some it can be a boring necessity. And yet, a lot of people are not aware of the fact that science can be beautiful and appealing to the senses. For example, when you observe the night sky, you are enjoying a spectacle that can be translated into data that scientists can use for their research. Microscopy images, phylogenetic studies and many more scientific techniques yield extremely attractive images.
Today, most scientific data are generated digitally, enabling easy transformation into non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that could be purchased and collected. Now you might be wondering, how does this enhance the accessibility of science? When we explore a museum, we do not simply glance at paintings or sculptures, we delve into the stories behind them. We become curious and start inquiring about the artist’s life at that particular moment. We ponder the historical events depicted in the artwork and their broader historical significance. Even some myths and legends are perpetuated and transmitted thanks to art pieces. A science NFT would not only be appealing, it would contain a story behind it: What has been its impact on scientific knowledge? On the community? Who is the author and what else have they done during their career?
This reasoning guided the development of the Open Science Marketplace, a pivotal piece in Intellart’s larger ecosystem. Authors of scientific publications can create permanent representations of their articles on the Cardano blockchain. These unique entities are referred to as Open Science NFTs, or osNFTs for short. Users will be able to interact with each other and partake in a micro-economy, forming a web of connections, interactions and market participation that, over time, might amass sufficient data to give rise to a guiding signal. This signal could potentially steer researchers and funding agencies toward informed funding decisions.
You might be curious about our verification system, as ensuring author authenticity is essential to prevent abuse. When registering for an account, they will have the option to link their Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCiD), enabling our backend system to validate authorship claims. It is worth noting that officially, ORCiD primarily serves as an author disambiguation system and has not yet matured into a full-fleged identity verification system[1]. However, in practice, it provides a reliable means of confirming paper authorship. As the Open Science Marketplace transitions to mainnet, we plan to introduce additional measures for proving one’s authorship, such as confirming control of an institutional email address.
Conceptually, the system described above acts as a bridge that translates a real-world element (the scientific study), abstracts its organisational and permissioned layers, and then generates a representation of it on a permissionless system governed by simple but exceedingly reliable ownership structures — namely, a blockchain.
Naturally, we needed to provide users with the ability to mint, buy, sell and close (delist) NFTs. To guarantee the safety of our user’s funds, we placed strong emphasis on extensive testing of these smart-contracts, which proved to be a formidable challenge spanning from June to August of 2022. This is a period when the old Cardano testnet encountered issues, cardano-node was experiencing syncing problems, we saw the birth of the preview and preprod testnets, the Vasil hard-fork was bringing in new paradigms, and testing tools such as the Plutus Application Backend (PAB) were not fully functional. After looking at many options and testing multiple libraries, we settled on building upon MartifyLabs’s martify.contracts, which we tailored to suit our specific requirements. Then, we incorporated a comprehensive testing module on top, inspired by IOHK’s plutus-contract library.
To interact with these contracts, we created another standalone GitHub repository. As you can already tell, we are big fans of composability! To that end, we built a REST API that leverages pyCardano, Flask and a Blockfrost connection. This approach made the code reusable and decoupled from any specific dApp. However, our efforts didn’t end there; we took it a step further by adding an interactive React module, providing an open testing environment for anyone interested. This simple frontend explorer interfaces with Cardano wallets, with more integrations on the way.
