Good Day! This is PLUTO team.

As mentioned in the previous post, the second post is about PLUTO's solution.

PLUTO will use blockchain to progressively improve the whole process of scholarly communication with the goal of being transparent and rational.

Why blockchain & ethereum?

Blockchain which can be used to create a fully decentralized network model platform is a distributed ledger technology where nodes of the network grow a common chain of data with a consensus protocol. Therefore, PLUTO can achieve decentralized scholarly communication platform with added transparency and security through blockchain.

Utilizing Ethereum network's smart contract function can provide autonomous reward system. This reward system is the basis for providing appropriate reward and acknowledging contributions in scholarly communication. In other words, the PLUTO platform realized on Ethereum's blockchain can be made a space where scholarly communication contributions are recognized and resources are distributed in a rational way.

Platform Guideline

In designing the platform, PLUTO had following guidelines in mind, to achievea reasonable and transparent scholarly communication that is independent from centralization, capital and authority.

1. All actions and transactions on the platform are transparently open to the public.
2. All rights associated with any work on the platform are reserved by the original author.
3. All activities on the platform are compensated according to the contribution.
4. All major decisions on the platform are made by the consensus of participants.

Platform solution

▪ Research achievements dissemination
Unlike the traditional practice where recognized research achievements were limited to published research papers, the scope on PLUTO is extended to much more types of contents that arises in the intermediate process of a research. In other words, all research information that has potential to add value to academic development can be considered a research achievements with the consent of the participants. As research achievements are extended to broader sense, the format in which they are expressed should be also aligned. Besides traditional standardized form of papers, PLUTO offers an environment where supported various format that allows the most efficient delivery of research achievements like data sheets, videos, or etc.

Researchers who create their research achievements in these environment, set the general policies themselves, including the amount of tokens to be paid to reviewers, subscription pricing or open access, licensing, etc, and share it to the platform. Shared research achievements are stored using decentralized file storage system as Storj, IPFS, SIA, and Filecoin to ensure true distributed dissemination. And platform automatically issue Digital Object Identifiers(DOI) for every submission for systematic management.

▪Peer review process

PLUTO's research achievements evaluation process is a public peer review model in which all participants on the platform can participate in the evaluation at any time, all of which is recorded transparently.

PLUTO’s peer review is divided into blind and open period. In the initial stages of evaluation about shared research achievements, blind review will be conducted, and after the certain conditions are met, will proceed to an open review. When converted to open period, contents of blind period are also made public on the platform. The transition to open period will be based on the time T when N reviews are submitted and aggregate reputation of reviewers reach M.

Blind review is mandatory for both quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and open review can be performed selectively. Quantitative evaluation is given by X categories such as originality, influence, scientific validity, and Qualitative evaluation is made with text supporting quantitative evaluation. Final evaluation score of a research achievement is calculated as an average of all quantitative evaluations it receives, weighted by the reputation of each reviewer at the time of the reviewing.

Reviewers in closed period are reinforced their reputations according to how close their quantitative review is to the final evaluation at the end of closed period, similar to the predicted market. Also tokens staked by the author are distributed in the same manner as well. Reviewers in open period will not be rewarded with tokens, but will be affected by reputation.

▪Researcher reputation
Researcher's reputation is based on the contribution to activities on platform and the number of votes representing recognition of participants. The detailed computation of reputation is transparent to the core protocol of the platform.

Researchers have a reputation for: When the number of citations or votes of shared research achievements is large, When the number of votes about own review that is large, When the number of citations or votes to networking activity is large, The quantitative review close to the final evaluation during the closed review period. This reputation weights researcher's intentions on the platform and is used as a measure of confidence.

With token reward, PLUTO's reputation gives a strong motivation for contributions and honest behavior, so having a reasonable reputation formula is one of the core essentials of the platform. Therefore, PLUTO will improve the formula through Machine Learning based on data from the Proof of Concept(Poc) prototype, which is due for release in late October, and early stage launches.

▪Researcher Social Network (On-demand Inquiries)
Beyond merely being a simple Social Network, PLUTO provides a marketplace of research oriented inquiries. The basic concept is to set in advance bounty rewards in tokens, and an answer chosen by either the requester or the community receives the reward. Researchers can request for a verification of reproducibility, validation of data, proxy experiment, the data itself, or any other information relevant to a certain research through researcher social networking.

These inquiry and response activities are freely available to other users, so requestors and respondents can enhance their reputation by voting participants, just like any other activity on the platform. In addition, Respondents are given not only bounties and reputation but also potential opportunities, which is an important incentive to actively share their research informations. Pluto will integrate a variety of digital tools specialized for certain research fields into the platform to provide incentives for more questions and answers.

▪Resource Allocation
Based on platform evaluation and reputation scores, resources for research can be allocated in a transparent and efficient manner through the platform. Such resource allocation includes but is not limited to management of research funds and decision of their grants, crowdfunding for research, recruitment or proposal for a joint research, renting of equipment and facilities, requesting or providing language editing service related research and etc.

Putting the records of interactions in these resource allocations transparently on the platform would enable far more applications. Managing a trace of equipment status and renting records on the platform would expand to a service for equipment management, repair, or insurances. Crowdfunding and research grant management, if recorded transparently, will enable further transparency in entire flow of funds in researches, from fundraising to actual use of funds.

Credibility of individual researchers can be inferred from their reputations and Evaluation on nonperson entities such as employers, laboratories, or etc can be made by platform 's participants consensus as well. This would generate criteria for deciding a better allocation of resources in both supply and demand side. Even decisions of these resource allocation can be left to platform 's participants consensus in a long term.

In conclusion, PLUTO provides a fair environment that can contribute to academic development for approximately 7.8 million researchers worldwide. Above all, PLUTO allows researchers to get motivated to continue research, which will help accelerate valuable academic development.

In the next post, we will share some design issues of our solution that team is struggling with.

Any other comments or feedback are appreciated, please feel free to comment.

Thank you!