Cambridge, MA-based start-up ARTiFACTS has launched the world's first blockchain-based platform for scholarly research. Formed by a team of academic publishing software veterans, the new company is the first of its kind to deploy a collaborative platform that allows researchers to register their discoveries and provide and receive attribution on an immutable blockchain ledger.
The ARTiFACTS platform was designed to address the fundamental shortcomings of traditional knowledge dissemination and attribution. Currently, researchers only receive acknowledgment for a published article when it appears in an indexed journal, limiting exposure to the full scope of their research contributions. ARTiFACTS' blockchain-based platform allows researchers to create a permanent, real-time record of all research contributions in an unbreakable, universally-accessible digital ledger. With this new platform, ARTiFACTS has created a new infrastructure for cataloguing, searching, and attributing scholarly contributions.
The ARTiFACTS platform consists of primary elements such as Collaboration Platform, Attribution Engine and Comprehensive Index. The Collaboration Platform is a workflow management and collaboration tool leveraging an open source platform that allows researchers to manage projects and teams and share research findings, giving creators control of their content and instantly establishing proof-of-existence. The Attribution Engine is an Ethereum blockchain engine that records a permanent, valid, and immutable ledger of record for all research findings and their cited/citing attributions, building a comprehensive, real-time, profile of scholarly contribution. Comprehensive Index is a community index of all research artifacts and linkages that speeds research by allowing discovery of the full spectrum of research outputs, not just published works.
ARTiFACTS was founded by a team of executives with deep experience in primary and secondary academic publishing software, financial services technology, and media. The company's leadership team have all held senior management roles with the world's leading academic research, fintech, and educational technology providers, including Thomson Reuters (Web of Science and EndNote), Elsevier (Scopus), ORCID, and SunGard, among others.
The company's formal launch took place at the Eighteenth Population Health Colloquium in Philadelphia, PA, the seminal conference of healthcare industry leaders hosted by Thomas Jefferson University's Jefferson College of Population Health. ARTiFACTS announced at the event that in addition to launching its blockchain based workflow platform, it had created the first-ever archive specifically for the population health community for research artifacts of all types: pophealth.discoverresearch.ai
Researchers can go to sys.artifacts.ai to sign up and start collaborating, sharing and attributing.
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