Decentralize peer review
A blockchain-based peer review ecosystem for academic publishing
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About

  • Peer-review ecosystem

    PRINCIPIA is a transparent blockchain-powered ecosystem for peer-review of scientific outputs (ie, papers, patents, ...). The platform allows users, including existing publishing groups, to create and manage peer-reviewed journals.

  • Peer-review market

    PRINCIPIA is a free market where researchers and publishers exchange crypto-tokens for journals, reviews and publications. Output is automatically open access.

  • Motivates reviewers

    PRINCIPIA's referees are remunerated for their efforts and quality reviews. At variance with the traditional peer-review system, good referees are transparently and automatically rewarded in crypto-tokens for their commitment.

  • Reputation and prestige

    PRINCIPIA naturally allows to recognize prestige of users and journals, with an intrinsic reputation system which does not depend on third-parties and heuristics.

  • Beyond impact factor

    PRINCIPIA scores the reputation of a journal according to the reputation of the corresponding editorial committee. This facilitates groups of people with high reputation to bootstrap new journals.

Motivation

Current peer-review system Principia peer-review system Consequences
Referees review (mostly) for free Referees review and are remunerated Power and money more balanced between researchers and publishers
Referees have often no incentives for quality reviews Referees remuneration depends on quality reviews Referees are motivated to write good reviews
New journals are difficult and expensive to start New journals are easy and free to start More genuine competition between journals. Journals get naturally more specialised
Hard to bootstrap a new journal's reputation A new journal inherits the reputation of its founders Journals not achieving their mission, or high quality, will die out automatically
Open access journals desirable, but often very expensive All journals are open access and very cost-effective Dramatic reduction of costs to access research output ad higher impact of research content

Our Team

Andrea Mambrini, Ph.D.

Data scientist, expert in Evolutionary Algorithms, Optimization and Machine Learning. CTO at Exogene. Previously Portent.IO, European Space Agency, Honda Research, Vodafone, Black Swan Data.

Manlio De Domenico, Ph.D.

Physicist, Head of Complex Multilayer Network Group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento). Associate Editor for the Journal of Complex Networks and for Complexity. Expert in Complex Systems, Emergent Behaviour and Information Theory

Andrea Baronchelli, Ph.D.

Lecturer in Mathematics at City, University of London, and Research Fellow at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies. Expert in the collective dynamics of social and cognitive systems.

Daniele Marinazzo, Ph.D.

Physicist, associate professor at Ghent University. He studies dynamical systems and complex networks, mainly in the context of neuroscience. Editor for PLOS One, PLOS Computational Biology, Network Neuroscience, and NeuroImage. Sensible to the themes of open-access and reform of the current publishing system

Michele Starnini, Ph.D.

Researcher at ISI Foundation, former J. McDonnell fellow. Interested in Statistical physics of complex systems, Networks science, Computational social science.

Claudio Santini

Software engineer with 360-degree full-stack web experience. He has worked with big financial institutions as well as small companies, designing web architectures and delivering complex visual AngularJS web applications and Node.js or Django back-ends.

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