Novelty Network
Open Access, decentralized journal with In-built reputation system
About
The problem it solves With the current state of academic journals globally publishing a research paper is heavily centralized with only three major academics journal publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley) having a monopoly on deciding and publishing papers in their periodic journals with over 72% scientific publications locked up behind a paywall. We aim to provide a different incentive model for academicians that rewards them by both building up their reputation as well as getting capital investments. With Novelty Network we attempt to provide a decentralized publishing platform with open access. Enabling peer aggregated reputation of papers and authors through weight based votes represented by an ERC721 token. Even though we use NFT's they are still tradeble and can be bought off someone therefore still somewhat fungible. We offset that by increasing the weightage of a vote if they are only transferred i.e voted by one paper author to another author's paper otherwise the vote weight is reset to minimum hence incentivise users to keep the token within the system. The mechanism rewards both the original authors,the peer reviewers by showing there approval by voting on a paper and also other authors who's previous work is citied by any other new paper, creating a network effect.
How it's made
Challenges we ran into We had a few problems with minting new ERC721 tokens while keep it secure so that not just anyone could mint new tokens and also with calling the safeTransferFrom function with figuring out the user flow of whether to get them to approve our contract to transfer the token or have them directly transfer the token and then update our state based on that, we ended up chosing the former. We overcomed these bugs good old debuggin with console.log's and trial & error as well as going back and reading the concepts and documentation to figure out what were we're going wrong or what assumption we're making