Academia is unique in that professionals with highly specialized expertise, who are paid by public institutions, write articles and provide peer reviews to corporations who profit greatly without giving back to the research enterprise. Why are they willing to gift their review services and intellectual property to businesses, who then turn around and charge our institutions again for the products of their research?
Why are universities, governments and taxpayers ok paying for the labor costs of a massive multi - billion-dollar industry?
The problems inherent in the scholarly publishing industry are well known. A 2015 paper showed that five academic publishers published over half of all scholarly papers in 2013. This concentration of power in the publishing industry allows the publishers control over subscription fees. Scholarly publishers’ profit margins rival that of Google or Apple.
Open access has been an idealistic goal since the advent of the internet. Publishers hold the power with their monopoly on publishing some of the most prestigious journals, in which academics strive to have their research published and which they require their libraries to subscribe to, so there is no incentive to stop charging exorbitant subscription prices. In fact, the transition to online publications has made this problem worse; the ability to avoid printing costs and to bundle electronic journals into “big deal” packages has allowed publishers to put more of the subscription fees they charge directly into their pockets.
Eureka: Leveraging Blockchain for scientific research
Eureka is an open source, decentralized platform that is designed to manage scientific research papers from their initial submission, right through the reviewing process and even will provide quality metrics on each paper.
The scientific publication market is both highly profitable and heavily centralized around a few major publishers. Just as bitcoin disrupted the established financial community, Eureka aims to revolutionize the peer-reviewed research industry. By implementing decentralized storage, Big data analytics and their own ERC20 token on the Ethereum network, Eureka will do away with the inherent bias in publishing, provide transparent peer reviewing and fair rewards for peer reviewers.
The Eureka Ecosystem
Decentralized storage solutions and cloud computing will be used to provide an affordable platform to publish journals. Decentralized journals will be built on the same principles as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations using the blockchain and smart contracts. The entry costs for new journals is prohibitive, and has resulted in monopolies or oligarchies in many areas, no particular subscription method is enforced, making the publisher free to use any method that works for them.
Payments within the Eureka ecosystem, whether it is for copyright licenses, journal management or rewarding peer reviewers, will be implemented with exchanges of Eureka’s own token, EKA. Using the Ethereum blockchain will ensure transparency at all stages of the publications life cycle, eliminating the bias associated with current publishing monopolies.
It also provides the opportunity to reward the vast numbers of volunteer peer reviewers for their work.
Machine learning and Big data will be used to analyze and report the quality and impact of each publication, providing a useful and fair feedback system to researchers.
Token sale
Accepted currencies – BTC, ETH
Token Ticker symbol – EKA
Public sale price per token ($) – 0.10
Total supply (#) – 298,607,040
Tokens for ICO sale (#) – 149,303,520
Hard Cap ($) – 14,930,352
Soft Cap ($) – 2,000,000
https://eurekatoken.io/
https://eurekatoken.io/whitepaper_v3_1.pdf
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5043012
https://t.me/EUREKAToken