What is Dejournal?

Dejournal is a decentralized application for publishing scientific pre-prints on Ethereum blockchain and IPFS.

Dejournal addresses the current challenges in scientific publishing.

1. Most scientific papers are locked behind paywalls. Many scientists cannot afford to pay expensive subscriptions and are therefore not updated about the latest scientific findings. This prevents them to contribute equally to the scientific community. Papers published on Dejournal will be always freely available.
2. Scientific papers are published in journals, which can define their own policies and quality standards. This gave rise to many predatory journals who charge high publication fees to publish bad quality papers. Dejournal works differently. Anything can be published on Dejournal. The community decides on the quality through our peer-review system.
3. Publishing in a scientific journal requires you to give away your copyrights to the journal. All materials published on Dejournal are copyrighted by their authors.
4. Scientific journals are businesses. Scientists cannot influence the business decissions. Dejournal is an organization run by the community. We are open to everyone willing to contribute.

Features

Decentralized application

Dejournal is a decentralized application. This means it doesn’t rely on servers in data warehouse. Instead, it runs directly from your browser.

A typical journal stores scientific papers on their own servers. If they shut the servers down, noone can access the scientific papers they host. Dejournal, instead, hosts papers on Interplanetary Filesystem (IPFS). IPFS is a network of computers (nodes) that replicate the data from other nodes. You can set up your own node and help us replicate the Dejournal data.

In the future, nodes that replicate (pin) Dejournal data will be also financially rewarded.

Notarization of paper submission

Paper stored on IPFS can be accessed by a unique identifier (hash). This is an immutable identifier and guaranties that the file has not been changed. This identifier is also written to Ethereum blockchain. When you add an entry to Ethereum blockchain it is carved in stone unless a digital apocalypse happens. This also means that your submission is notarized - you can prove that you submitted a paper at a certain time. All you need is your Metamask wallet (keep your private keys and seed phrases safe!).

Open source

The code of Dejournal platform is hosted on Github. You can inspect the code that it does what it says. It also means that anyone can contribute to the project. Dejournal is a community-driven initiative.

Democratic

The central part of Dejournal will be a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). A member can become anyone who is interested in the future of Dejournal and open science. Membership will be awarded to anyone contributing money or time.

DAO will be funded by publication fees and by member contributions. A member can suggest Dejournal improvement proposals. An improvement proposal who passes a majority vote will be awarded a grant.