This is a unique project that lets authors upload papers and define royalty splits for each author. Whenever an organization or an individual donates to the project, the money is automatically split among the authors based on those splits — and sent directly to their wallets via the blockchain.
In the world of academia, authors often struggle to get fair compensation for their work. Traditional publishing models can be opaque and unfair, leaving many without adequate recognition or financial support. This project aims to change that by leveraging blockchain for transparent, fair royalty distribution.
Pay-to-publish journals offer no incentives for the authors, despite the immense effort behind their research and writing. I dream of a future where research and science are open to all, and authors are fairly compensated for their contributions.
Thanks to the power of blockchain and the concept of DeSci, we can now build a system where authors are incentivized to publish, and readers can access content freely.
To learn more about the "Regen Nature" of crypto, read this: The Green Pill
We use Pinata (which uses IPFS) to store the papers. To avoid bloating the smart contract and ensure authors don’t need to pay gas fees upfront, paper metadata and royalty splits are stored in a Neon(PostgreSQL) database. Transactions are handled by a smart contract written in Solidity, currently deployed on the Polygon Amoy testnet.
The initial version of this project is just a proof of concept, built to attract grants or funding so I can properly deploy and scale it (I'm a broke college student in India, lol). In the next version, I plan on changing the design of the smart contract, which will basically have a mapping to store the balances of accounts on chain, which will reduce gas costs and allow the authors to add cited papers in their royalty splits without adding the wallet addresses of the cited authors manually, Of course this depends on whether the public goods and DeSci Community think this is a good project and whether i get a grant to build this, so I'm not holding my breath on it.