🏁Design goals

These are the properties that the protocol strives to achieve

Verifiable ownership

By controlling the credentials that control the state of research outputs and other contributions, creators own all of their content without reliance on an intermediary. This approach, coupled with robust rights retention enacted through licensing, enables researchers to truly own and control their data.

Open credit

Science is built on collaboration, the protocol must enable collaborative contribution opportunities and a robust and granular credit model. The scientific record should not be composed of static information, but be a living data graph of incremental improvements. Any contribution to science should be creditable, not just the authorship of articles.

Proving who did what, and when, needs to be possible for all contributions at the most granular level possible. Peer review, reproducibility checks, metadata cataloging, et cetera, should all be creditable. Knowing who did what when is instrumental in building a robust and fair credit system, so the “version of record” can become a “record of versions”.

Network participation

For the protocol to be truly successful in the long run, it must be useful and extensible by a large, diverse community, and easy to participate in as a network operator. The knowledge of humanity should be able to far outlast any individual and company. This requires a new architecture which is fundamentally open and P2P. The protocol is designed to power a fully open and participatory infrastructure, where anyone can take part in storing copies of open data over a distributed network.

FAIR principles

The FAIR principles stand for “Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable”. FAIR infrastructure requires unique and deterministically resolvable identifiers for all digital with machine-readable metadata. All properties of the scientific record should be both machine- and human-readable, including publications, their components, and their metadata.

No Vendor lock-in

The scientific record is our collective property, and interacting with it should not be dependent on the continued collaboration of any single service provider. There needs to be separation between data and service provider layer, thus preventing “vendor lock-in” or capture by any single entity.

Data integrity

The scientific record needs to be persistently addressable; including links that continue to point to the same content to which they were once made, and never cease to function. The technology now exists to protect from link rot and eliminate content drift from the scientific record.

While publications can evolve, links made to a specific version should still resolve to that specific content. This implies that any update is manifested as the appending of a new version - not overwriting the old version - and that no content can ever be truly removed.

For data that cannot be shared openly, publications can still expose the fingerprint of the data. This allows regulatory access through formal requests, to enable complying with legislation.