Science DAO Framework

The Science DAO Framework (SDF) is a software framework for building decentralized scientific communities as DAOs. Each Science DAO (sDAO) is specialized for a particular academic discipline. An sDAO allows its members to collaborate, learn, share knowledge, review papers, debate, and earn credit for contributions.

SDF is agnostic about how large or small, how open or closed, any particular scientific society should be. SDF gives such groups the power to set their own standards and policing mechanisms. The goal of SDF is to improve traditional journals and academic research organizations by providing useful contemporary IT tools to improve their operation and governance.

Overview

Project High-level FAQ

SDF uses the general DGF system for building DAOs by specifying their governance structure. Academic societies can use this structure to choose the governance style that best matches their goals, based on their stated principles and values. DGF allows complex accounting mechanisms to assign meaningful reputation to members based on their contributions. Separate types of REP tokens are minted and distributed for writing articles, reviewing articles, governing the organization, and for making general comments on all of the previous actions.

The initial Science DAOs include some of the subjects most relevant to building decentralized networks, including:

• Peer to Peer Technology The decentralized society for research, development, and sharing of P2P tools.
• Decentralized Governance The decentralized society for analysis and development of new approaches to the organization and guidance of decentralized networks.

SDF is itself a decentralized organization whose membership is open to the global public. Power in the the organization is dynamically determined by participation, judged by the community.

Mission

Promote understanding and discovery using the tools of science.

Justification

Main article: Motivation for SDF

SDF is devoted to using DAO technology to decentralize the development and dissemination of scientific knowledge on a global scale. There are many pressing problems which serve to motivate this undertaking. Private capture of the process of scientific development can impede healthy intellectual discovery and human advancement. For example, five privately owned publishing houses, such as Elsevier and Springer, have centralized the majority control of official scientific communications.

The solution to many of the issues threatening the healthy development of the institutions of science requires improvements to the existing frameworks of scientific societies. New technological platforms can encourage scientists to collaborate openly, govern their editing processes transparently, and accurately account for credit for discoveries and factual verification.

Cf., main article: SDF transcendental values

Key Concepts

REP tokens

Science DAO participants are awarded with reputation tokens, for contributions which their fellow participants deem valuable. Reputation should be non-fungible between domains, meaning that one kind of reputation token has no power in Validation Pools for a different kind. SDF has to following distinct domains:

• aREP - article authoring reputation
• rREP - reputation for reviewing articles
• cREP - reputation for commenting on articles, reviews, or other comments
• gREP - governance reputation, which determines power to make changes to the DAO's protocols

aREP is associated with writing articles. In a Science Publishing DAO, an article is a post in the DAO's Forum. An article's citations would make weighted references (positive and negative) to other articles. The weighted, annotated citations give us the peer validation mechanism that determines a paper's importance in the scientific society that is governed by the DAO. A work product which receives favorable review shall attribute aREP to its authors, as well as to the authors of the works cited, in a recursive manner, up to some (configurable) depth.

rREP is associated with reviews. A reviewer receives rREP for contributing a review that is validated by the DAO. Reviews can be solicited by anyone, including authors of articles, academic societies, or universities who employ the authors. Standards for fees, including no fee, are determined by the particular sDAO.

gREP is associated with proposals to modify any particular sDAO's parameters. gREP may be staked on new governance proposals. Successful proposals shall attribute gREP to their authors and supporters. Often there is a close relationship between gREP and rREP.

cREP plays an important role in the soft protocols governing the organization. Fundamentally any DAO is a group of individuals. Their behavior is partly shaped by their communication. Comments are the primary vehicle for this communication. Each organization will develop its own culture determining the meaning of comments and cREP. An organization may want its participants to be able to stake their own reputation toward promoting particular comments, and toward suppressing others. Our goal is to enable each community to articulate its own values, in a way that is transparent for the community as well as the public to observe.

Governance

Main article: DGF governance

SDF follows the general framework of DGF for instituting governance via reputation-weighted democracy. Votes using REP tokens are tallied by the Validation Pool smart contract, which mints and redistributes REP based on outcomes. DGF provides executive, legislative, and judicial governance.

System design

UI Software

Each sDAO must provide software that allows the public to access its capabilities. This software should provide representations corresponding to each of the areas of responsibility listed above. In the following subsections we discuss each area of responsibility, and the corresponding functionality we expect.

Ideally the UI software will be formally governed by each sDAO, itself. However, this might reach a point of diminishing returns as smaller sDAOs will not have the resources to keep their UIs up to date with changing standards. The alternative is to allow the broader DAO community to manage the deployment processes for the UI software. SDF provides recommended defaults with off-the-shelf UI software, giving each DAO the power to select from basic useful parameters.

In its purest, ideal form this system could support stateless client applications, serving all operational data reliably from blockchain storage. However, blockchain storage is expensive; so in practice, we only want to use it in cases where we really want the long-term guarantee.

This means that we must implement a separate, off-chain stateful layer. There are a variety of options for this off-chain data layer, which we are exploring. For now we merely specify that such a layer must exist.

Smart Contracts

• Availability SC - Enables DAO participants to declare their availability to review
• Work SC - The main work most Science DAOs perform for fees are initially reviews of articles. Enables public users request work products of the DAO.
  • This smart contract will accept certain parameters that will function to specify the proposed agreement.
• Validation Pool SC - Enables REP-token-weighted democracy.
• Forum SC: Enables DAO participants to discuss, propose, and vote on modifications to the DAO operating parameters

Hard and soft protocols

There are both formal and informal processes (hard and soft protocols) associated with each of the above outlined areas of responsibility. Hard protocols are specified by code, and enacted by running systems, whether on or off chain. Soft protocols refer to patterns of participant behaviors.

See Also

• DGF