Open Knowledge Archive: Proposal for Merit-Based Interdisciplinary Preprint Server Description This proposal outlines a novel approach to open scientific publishing that addresses three critical failures in the current academic system: institutional gatekeeping, disciplinary fragmentation, and binary validation models. Key Innovation: A concentric ring architecture where papers enter freely at the outer rim (zero gatekeeping) and move inward based on accumulated validation. The center represents maximum interdisciplinary verification—where fields converge rather than separate. The Problem: Traditional journals reject AI-assisted research based on writing style, not content quality Independent researchers face systematic barriers (institutional email requirements, credential-based filtering) Interdisciplinary work falls between disciplinary silos Binary accept/reject model provides no pathway for progressive validation The Solution: Ring-based validation (outer rim = unverified, inner rings = progressively validated) Domain slices (papers positioned by subject area, can span multiple fields) Merit determines position, not credentials or authorship method Completely open access (readers never pay) Implementation: Phase 1: $8,000 proof of concept using AI-assisted development (Claude Code)Sustainable through hybrid revenue model (minimal per-paper fees, institutional partnerships, donations) All code released under AGPL-3.0 (prevents proprietary forks) Structured as irrevocable non-profit (cannot be commercialized) This proposal is released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 to prevent commercial exploitation while enabling open collaboration. It represents infrastructure for the commons—research validation that serves knowledge, not profit. Includes: 1. Full architectural specification (ring/slice topology, validation pipeline) 2. Technical implementation plan (backend, frontend, moderation system) 3. Governance model (non-profit structure, anti-gaming provisions) 4. Financial sustainability model (revenue sources, cost projections) 5. Phase 1 budget ($8,000 for AI-assisted development) Status: Proposal stage. Seeking collaborators, volunteers, and initial funding.
This study analyzes 128,286 academic papers tagged as blockchain or cryptocurrency research by OpenAlex's machine-learning concept classifier, published between 2013 and mid-2026. A broader keyword search across paper abstracts identifies 1,938,409 publications that mention Web3-related terms. The analysis measures keyword frequency, temporal trajectories, growth rates, citation distributions, geographic concentration, institutional output, and open access rates. Key findings include 117x growth in annual blockchain publications between 2013 and 2025, the rise of zero-knowledge proofs as the fastest-growing cryptographic primitive (2.1x growth, 2025-2026 vs. 2022-2023), DeFi research experiencing a 74x increase from 2019 to 2025, NFT research peaking in 2023 before declining, China and India leading global output with 13.5% and 13.3% of all papers respectively, and 43.5% of all papers receiving zero citations.
This study conducts a scientometric analysis of global financial risk management research to map its intellectual structure, thematic trends, and collaboration networks over the period 2000–2025. Data were retrieved from the Scopus database using a comprehensive search strategy and analyzed with VOSviewer to visualize co-authorship patterns, country collaborations, keyword co-occurrences, thematic clusters, and temporal developments. The results indicate that risk management, risk assessment, and financial markets remain the most influential and frequently studied topics, while emerging themes such as sustainability, decentralized finance, cryptocurrency, and supply chain resilience reflect the field’s adaptation to evolving technological, economic, and environmental challenges. Collaboration analysis highlights the dominance of countries such as China, the United Kingdom, and India, alongside increasing participation from emerging economies. The study offers practical implications for policymakers and financial practitioners to align strategies with current research priorities, and theoretical contributions by identifying conceptual linkages and emerging research fronts. Limitations include reliance on a single database and the inherent biases of citation-based analysis.
The article investigates the theoretical foundations of grant financing, reveals approaches to the definition of a grant, which allowed to clarify the elemental structure and essence of the definition of grant financing as a form of financial support provided to organizations or individuals for the implementation of certain projects, research, programs or initiatives. The features, functions and components of grant funding are unified. Different approaches to the typology of grant funding are substantiated, in particular, by such classification criteria as: sources of funding, areas of activity, mechanism of provision, duration, amount of funding, type of project, terms of use, etc. The study conducted a SWOT analysis of grant funding, outlining its strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. At the same time, the role of key partners and international financial organizations with which Ukraine cooperates in grant financing is identified, including the following: European Union, United Nations Special Fund (UNDP), World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), United Nations Development Fund (UNDEF), International Renaissance Foundation (EBRD), etc. These organizations and their programs are important sources of financial support and technical assistance for the implementation of various projects in different sectors of the economy and communities of Ukraine, which is especially important in the context of decentralization. The author outlines the problematic aspects of grant funding under martial law in Ukraine, among which are bureaucratic obstacles, lack of transparency and efficiency in the distribution of grants, funding instability, lack of a long-term strategy, insufficient attention to monitoring and evaluation, but the author sees great potential for the development of grant funding in Ukraine, which made it possible to provide a number of recommendations to mitigate them, in particular, needs to increase transparency and accounting of grant funding, simplify grant procedures, develop long-term strategies, engage the private sector, develop funding mechanisms, etc.
Francisco J. Díaz, Carolina Menchaca, Lukas Weidener
Introduction The scientific community is increasingly interested in leveraging decentralized technologies to address systemic challenges such as the reputation economy, the monopolization of academic publishing, and the replication crisis. This study presents an analysis of the Decentralized Science (DeSci) landscape in 2023, focusing on organizational structures, technological foundations, and funding mechanisms of DeSci organizations. Methods A 16-question survey was distributed to DeSci organizations between December 2023 and April 2024, and responses from 49 projects were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods. Results Results highlight the prominent role of Ethereum as the dominant blockchain platform in DeSci, the varied applications of blockchain in scientific processes, and a significant emphasis on community building and infrastructure development. Funding sources within the ecosystem are moving towards partnerships with more traditional organizations, including academia. However, most projects lack DAO features for governance. It remains uncertain whether they will adopt more DAO-like structures in the future or deploy a different organizational model. Discussion Our findings offer a comprehensive overview of the progress and challenges facing the DeSci ecosystem, including slow project progression due to leadership issues and limited funding for most DeSci projects. By identifying key patterns and areas for improvement, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the factors driving success and sustainability in DeSci.
In recent years, propelled by societal transformations and technological advancements, emerging technologies founded upon diverse disciplines such as financial and information technology have rapidly evolved. Identifying the trends associated with these emerging technologies and extracting their salient topics is crucial in order to accurately grasp the developmental trajectory of these tools and for their efficient utilization. In this study, we chronologically categorize information derived from five types of multi-source data, including journal articles, patent inventions, and industry reports, into distinct periods. We employ the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic model to identify emerging technological themes within these periods and utilize a dual-index theme lifecycle analysis method to construct a hotspot theme distribution map, thereby facilitating the extraction of significant themes. Through empirical research on blockchain financial technology, we ultimately identify 22 thematic areas of blockchain finance and extracted eight prominent themes, including financial technology, cross-border payments, digital invoices, supply chain finance, and decentralization. By analyzing these themes alongside their respective popularity levels, we validate that the methods above can be used to effectively identify emerging technological hotspots and illuminate their developmental directions.
Abstract Purpose The popularity of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology has been increasing in recent years. Thus, the study uses bibliometric analysis to examine the development of research on cryptocurrency and blockchain trends. Need for the Study The very few researchers analyse the bibliometric trends in blockchain and cryptocurrency research to classify the articles according to research methodology and journal quality. Further, a complete study of citations or co-citations based on co-occurrence analysis needs to be added to the bibliometric research. Therefore, it is required to study this topic in detail. Methodology The VOSviewer software and Scopus analysis are used to conduct a bibliometric study on the biographies of articles published on cryptocurrency and blockchain trends. A total of 1,186 papers from the Scopus database are retrieved to analyse the trends in this field of research. Findings The study examines the total citations, papers with the most citations, authors and journals, prominent institutions and country contributions. In addition to listing the top 10 most significant articles with their years of publication and total citations, this study provides insight into the top 10 prominent journals of cryptocurrency and blockchain trends. Additionally, during the past 15 years, the United States and the United Kingdom have received the most citations and publications on cryptocurrencies and blockchain trends. This study also identifies and critically investigates the top 10 journals in the specialised field with the highest Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) and citation scores.
This article discusses the issues with traditional scientific publishing and the solutions offered by DeSci. It covers problems caused by oligopoly in scientific publishing, author-reviewer-editor triangulation, predatory journals, and funding and resource allocation. These issues result in gated publishing, peer review bias, publish or perish culture, centralized funding, poor publication quality, low accessibility, low transparency, and low reproducibility. This study discusses DeSci's solutions to the aforementioned problems through blockchain technologies, including DAO, DBDAO, NFT, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, IP-NFT, and IPFS. Sample applications and projects are provided to illustrate these solutions. DeSci's solutions represent a transition from oligopoly in scientific production to the true Open Science era.
Background: Rapid advancements in Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), including blockchain, are foundational to a new era of digital innovation. This innovation has catalyzed the emergence of ‘Decentralized Science (DeSci),’ a new concept and movement that aims to address the challenges of modern science. Objective: Given the novelty of the field of DeSci, this study aims to provide a comprehensive definition of the term as well as explore and conceptualize shared values and guiding principles inherent to DeSci. Methods: In line with the objectives of this study, an exploratory literature review was conducted to identify and synthesize the scholarly and secondary literature. The search and selection process included six databases (PubMed, Google Scholar, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, arXiv, and Social Science Research Network), and the search period was limited to the last 15 years, from 2008 to 2023. To identify relevant secondary literature, such as articles, reports, blog posts, and website content, a keyword search was conducted in three search engines (Google.com, Bing.com, and Yahoo.com). Owing to the novelty of the concept and movement of DeSci, the exploratory literature review was supplemented by an anonymous online-based expert survey using a combination of single-choice and open-ended questions. The experts were selected based on predefined inclusion criteria, in association with their activities in the field of DeSci. The responses to the single-choice questions were subject to statistical analysis, whereas the open-ended questions were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Results: Seven studies were selected for evaluation as part of the search and selection process to identify relevant scholarly literature. Following the review of secondary literature, additional 24 publications were included in the analysis. In the expert survey, 39 valid datasets were collected and analyzed. Following the synthesis of the results of the exploratory literature review and expert survey, a comprehensive definition of the term ‘Decentralized Science’ (DeSci) was formulated to reflect recurring themes. As no publications that explicitly discussed or addressed the values or principles of DeSci in the exploratory literature review could be identified, a set of shared values and guiding principles for DeSci were defined based on the results of the expert survey. Conclusion: The results of this study underscore the emerging nature of DeSci, as evidenced by the limited availability of relevant information and scarcity of academic publications. While this study proposes a comprehensive definition of DeSci as well as a set of shared values and guiding principles, the results of this study highlight the importance of ongoing evaluation and validation. Furthermore, the results of this study indicate a clear need for future research in the field of DeSci, emphasizing its dynamic and developing nature.
Arthur Carvalho, Chad Anderson, Liudmila Zavolokina
Information systems (IS) conferences, as venues for the introduction of new knowledge to the IS community, require effective peer review systems to evaluate submitted research for quality, validity, and originality. We argue in this paper that questionable practices and degrading review quality may arise without direct incentives beyond reviewer altruism to engage in the peer review process. In particular, we highlight potential issues with arguably common practices in some IS conferences, such as peer review invitations sent to researchers who have also submitted papers for publication consideration and the increasing number of reviews performed by graduate students. To address these issues, we suggest three solutions: 1) quid pro quo rules; 2) the use of incentive-compatible methods whose scores are linked to relevant rewards; and 3) the use of blockchain-based tokens in tandem with smart contracts and zero-knowledge proofs. We conclude by offering directions the IS community can take to further study the highlighted issues and implement the proposed solutions.
The ROSA Journal focuses on three primary areas: (1) the examination of blockchain and Web3 research within societal contexts; (2) the application of quantitative methodologies in the fields of the humanities and social sciences; and (3) the provision of research-driven reviews of current social, political, and economic issues. We support the promotion of interdisciplinary collaboration between individuals from the natural sciences and the social sciences in order to produce a body of scientific knowledge that exceeds the capacity of a conventional academic journal.
In the case of a hard fork, the new rules contradict the old ones so much that the nodes that did not accept them do not perceive information from the nodes that accepted them. If we follow the same analogy with languages, the old nodes speak English, and the new ones speak Chinese. The hard fork, according to the cryptocurrency academy , involves changing the consensus mechanism itself, and in this case the entire network is divided into two parts that will never be able to interact again. This is because blocks that are recognized as valid in one part will not be considered valid in the other.<br> In the case of a hard fork, one of the formed branches (chains) of the system may die off, but it may also persist - it depends on how much hash power each of the branches has. A branch with a higher power has a better chance of success.
In this paper, we propose a novel framework for a scholarly journal, a token-curated registry (TCR). This model originates in the field of blockchain and cryptoeconomics and is essentially a decentralized system where tokens (digital currency) are used to incentivize quality curation of information. TCR is an automated way to create lists of any kind where decisions (whether to include N or not) are made through voting that brings benefit or loss to voters. In an academic journal, TCR could act as a tool to introduce community-driven decisions on papers to be published, thus encouraging more active participation of authors and reviewers in editorial policy and elaborating the idea of a journal as a club. TCR could also provide a novel solution to the problems of editorial bias and the lack of rewards/incentives for reviewers. In the paper, we discuss core principles of TCR, its technological and cultural foundations, and finally analyze the risks and challenges it could bring to scholarly publishing.
Current citation indexes such as Scopus and the Web of Science rely on centralized curation to function. This creates a series of potentially negative incentives, both financial and academic, which could be addressed through the creation of an unpermissioned, distributed ledger of citations. This paper explores this possibility using Bitcoin as a model.
Scientific funding within the academy is an often complicated affair involving disparate and competing interests. Private universities, for instance, are vastly outpacing public institutions in garnering large, prestigious, science-related grants and external research investment. Inequities also extend to the types of research funded, with government, corporate, and even military interests privileging certain types of inquiry. This article proposes an innovative type of science research fund using cryptocurrencies, a fast-growing asset class. Although not a total funding solution, staking coins, specifically, can be strategically invested in to yield compound interest. These coins use masternode technologies to collateralize the network and speed transaction pace and may pay dividends to masternode holders, allowing institutions that purchase these types of central hubs to potentially engage in a lucrative form of dividend reinvestment. Using cryptocurrencies as a new funding stream may garner large amounts of capital and creation of nonprofit institutes to support the future of funding scientific research within educational institutions.
Environmental Health has just received its first Impact Factor by Thomson ISI. At a level of 2.48, this achievement is quite satisfactory and places Environmental Health in the top 25% of environmental science journals. When the journal was launched in 2002, it was still unclear whether the Open Access publishing model could be made into a viable commercial enterprise within the biomedical field. During the past eight years, Open Access journals have become widely available, although still covering only about 15% of journal titles. Major funding agencies and institutions, including prominent US universities, now require that researchers publish in Open Access journals. Because of the profound role of scientific journals for the sharing of results and communication between researchers, the advent of Open Access may be of as much significance as the transition from handwriting to printing via moveable type. As Environmental Health is an electronic Open Access journal, the numbers of downloads at the journal website can be retrieved. The top-20 list of articles most frequently accessed shows that all of them have been downloaded over 10,000 times. Back in 2002, the first article published was accessed only 49 times during the following month. A year later, the server had over 1,000 downloads per month, and now the total number of monthly downloads approaches 50,000. These statistics complement the Impact Factor and confirm the viability of Open Access in our field of research. The advent of digital media and its decentralized mode of distribution - the internet - have dramatically changed the control and financing of scientific information dissemination, while facilitating peer review, accelerating editorial handling, and supporting much needed transparency. Both the meaning and means of "having an impact" are therefore changing, as will the degree and way in which scientific journals remain "factors" in that impact.
A hundred times a day I remind myself that my life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give, in the measure as I have received and am still receiving. Albert Einstein As mere mortals we do not have the skills of Harry Potter or even the great Houdini. Authorship is an honor and a privilege and though there is something magical about scientific writing its unlikely to find a place in Hollywood or even late night television. More likely than not, as is the case in most publications, citation by others is infrequent and stardom doesn’t exist. Most write scientific papers for the pleasure of being involved in something exciting, i.e., a new treatment, technique, or process that is thought to be better than others and certainly no worse. Others write papers because they simply want to share their scientific work with their peers and defend their ideas and methods. They believe that their work will impact others in the field in a positive way. Some believe their results may actually change practice, and or change our understanding of our daily work, whether clinical or experimental. Intellectual Capital Though the efforts of authors and co-authors are not patentable and rarely bring direct monetary gain, they are generally not expended for strictly altruistic motives. The hoped for academic advancement and associated academic promotion that follows successful publication is often accompanied by increased wages. Since the dollars are usually small, the academic and collegial respect gained are often more important. Thus, the intellectual capital of the investigator(s) and author(s) is significant and quantified similarly to the way a business usually evaluates and values their employees. As academically oriented physicians and scientists, our intellectual capital is our major asset. The value of that asset may be reflected in the market by salary and benefits. Like a professional athlete, most of our value is based on our performance. Authorship is one means of evaluating academic performance based on the assumption that much of that performance is reflective of our intellectual capital. After all, there are incredible skills involved in being an author. Though not as recognized as those of an athlete, they are no less impressive. Publishing frequently or in prestigious journals demonstrates to your company (hospital, laboratory, etc.) that your intellectual capital has relative value. It could be likened to fielding percentage in baseball or field goal percentage in basketball or football. In each case you are judged by your performance. In baseball, your batting average may be the most important statistic, unless of course you are a pitcher, where number of wins may be the key performance measure and ERA (earned run average) a secondary measure. As an academic physician, authorship should be but one measure of performance. As a physician, intellectual capital must incorporate your surgical and/or medical skills as well as your diagnostic and clinical acumen. Your value to your institution and your community is a composite. The number of patients seen and/or number of surgeries performed must not be the sole performance criterion of a clinician, nor should the absolute number of experiments performed by a bench scientist. These easily quantifiable attributes would give one a skewed and under-representative sense of one’s intellectual capital. There is yet another layer of confounding added to the attempt to value intellectual capital. Performing surgery or doing the experiment is, of course, difficult, but doing it correctly and achieving the prescribed goal is more dependent on the preparation than the actual procedure. The years and years of training in the classroom, the laboratory and or the operating theater to obtain the necessary intellectual capital and skills, must not be dismissed. With any great athlete, it is the off the field work and the preparation that makes that athlete great. Of course some are born with extraordinary skills, but their work ethic is what makes them great. For example, there are many great basketball players. Why do we remember Michael Jordan? Because Michael Jordan has all the skills but it is his off the court training and work effort that make him the best. In the corresponding world of science and medicine there are also Michael Jordans, like Einstein or Salk. Authors, not unlike great athletes, are interested in having their work recognized and appreciated by those who hear it or read it in the peer reviewed literature. Authors want recognition at a level commensurate with the quality and public importance of their work. Authors who work hard in the preparation of their scientific question, employ the best scientific methods and perform excellent clinical and basic research have the opportunity to publish their work. In so doing they expose themselves to peer review and open discussions for and against their work. But the decision of who should be the lead author and co-author is not unlike that of who gets to be in the starting lineup. Unlike sports, it is not simply the best guy on the team or even the captain. Authorship is very special and needs to be understood by all. Given what’s at stake in the assignment of authorship (e.g., respect and prestige, promotion, tenure), it is an awesome responsibility. So many people contribute to scientific endeavor, at levels ranging from the administrative to the strictly conceptual, that it can be difficult to discern where the lines of authorship should be drawn. However, there have begun to be clear guidelines about who to include as author and who not to. To me, it is all about intellectual capital. Someone had the idea, did the literature search, wrote the grant, coordinated and orchestrated the project, acquired the funding, analyzed the data, interpreted the data, wrote the paper, reviewed and edited the paper (often multiple times), etc. Now it is done and the weighing of who contributed what must be put down in writing upon submission of the paper. Who is included, who is first and last? Seniorship Does Not Mean Authorship Just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean your name should go on every paper. Or just because you’re the best know person at your institution does not mean you deserve authorship (this is known as the Halo Effect). There have been many institutions wherein the most senior person has been a “guest author.” This is neither necessary nor correct. The senior author may be present but if not part of the idea and the writing, editing and/or interpretation they need not be an author. Just reading the paper is not enough. To continue with the athletic and business metaphors, Michael Jordan does not take credit for other team members’ points to make his average better. He does not ask someone else to shoot his free throws and credit those shots to himself. A business person doesn’t usually give credit to others for his/her sales or expect a bonus for work someone else did. Likewise an author can only claim authorship for work they in fact do. Authorship Depends on What You Do, Not Who You Are JAMA deputy editor Drummond Rennie MD, 1 recently modified JAMA’ s Information for Authors to correspond directly to the most recent update of the uniform requirements originally recommended in 1985 and continuously updated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. 2 According to the ICMJE, authorship credit should be based only on: Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and Final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2, and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data, or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship. Among other journal editors, Rennie was dismayed to find that these guidelines were being ignored, and decided to follow the leads of the editors of The Lancet and BMJ in requiring that authors disclose their specific contributions to the article, and that the journal actually publish them. 1,3 For simplicity, JAMA provides a list of contributions categories for authors to check off before submission. Spine Policy Authorship is all about performance and valuing intellectual capital. Spine agrees with The Lancet, BMJ, and JAMA that authors should be recognized by their specific contributions to the manuscript under review and has added this requirement to the Information to Authors section. Each author’s contribution must be specified in the submission of a new manuscript. This should be present on the title page with each author’s degrees and institutional affiliation followed by their specific contribution to the submitted manuscript (Table 1). Beginning in the spring of 2003 this information will be published in the electronic version of Spine at the end of each article.Table 1: Authorship Contributions ChecklistOrder of Authors Regarding the issue of author order, Spine recommends that the lead author be the person responsible for much of the “work” as defined by collaborators and the investigative team. In many situations there are a priori criteria established for authorship, as well as a designated person(s) or writing group responsible for making important decisions around the issues of authorship. In some cases the Principal Investigator of a large study will act as the arbiter and decision-maker when potential conflicts of authorship, order, and or attribution arise. Spine supports the concept that the senior author of a work should be last but should not be automatically conferred. Senior authors can and should be first authors when their contribution to the work warrants it. Likewise, statisticians should be authors but not simply for running the numbers. They need to be involved in the study design, data acquisition and data interpretation with the writing team. A good statistician can not work in isolation and be brought on the scene to “save” the day by contributing a “P value.” This is not the way to utilize a statistical colleague nor is it a good use of their talents. Like an athletic team, there are positions each player can identify as their primary role, i.e., goalie, wing man, guard, pitcher, quarterback, etc. In a scientific paper for Spine I would like the authors to identify their contribution to the team. Many institutions around the world now use the Scientific Citation Index (SCI) as a means of quantifying ones academic efforts and the significance of their publications. Spine is ranked 2 in Immediacy and 4 in Impact when compared to all other orthopaedic journals in SCI’s Journal Citation Report, 4 and it is the only musculoskeletal journal listed in the evidence-based medicine lists by Sackett. 5,6 To reach this level of excellence requires us to maintain the highest of standards and to have policies that respect the individual authors, reviewers and readers. We are proud of our publication policies at SPINE and hope that we have clarified any doubts about a very complicated and truly important issue of authorship. As Einstein said, “A hundred times a day I remind myself that my life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give, in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.” To be accountable for one’s work is an expected responsibility imposed upon authors. In order to maintain the quality and integrity of one’s research and the respect of colleagues, institutions and representative societies, one’s authorship bears much of the burden of proof of one’s intellectual capital. At the same time, as an author you are more often than not dependent on the labors of others. Therefore, you must exert yourself in the contribution you make as an author so as to be deserving of the credit that is associated with authorship and the acclaim and or recognition it brings to bear on that intangible but all important intellectual capital.