Decentralized Science. Bringing transparency to academic peer reviewing

"P2P Models explores a new way of building collaborative platforms harnessing the blockchain. We are building a software framework to build decentralized infrastructure for collaborative economy organizations that do not depend on central authorities....

We are a team based at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), developing an ERC Granted research project led by Samer Hassan, Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and Associate Professor at UCM. Thus, we combine research and software development efforts, and we have to navigate the jungle of academic papers and publications and survive the academic’s “publish or perish” curse.  As do many others, we think academic publication and peer reviewing can be improved in many ways, such as its fairness, quality, performance, cost, etc. Moreover, an oligopoly of publishers owns more than half of the market, making a large profit from the free work of editors, reviewers and authors. Fortunately, in P2P Models we are studying how blockchain based solutions can help us improve the governance and value distribution in online communities, and we decided to apply our own proposals to improve science publication and peer reviewing. This is how the Decentralized Science project was born, as an effort to solve the problems we were facing in academia and promote the values of Open Access and Open Science movements with the tools we were designing and researching in the P2P Models project...."