In development. Alpha on the Polygon Amoy testnet
Open practice is asked for everywhere and effectively rewarded almost nowhere.
OpenMaieutica incentivizes it with Merit Tokens and NFT Open Badges, and turns it into an immutable record on a public blockchain: deposited, timestamped, certified, checkable by anyone, and ensured by cryptography.
An Aristotelian view of the OpenMaieutica cosmos. Hover over the spheres to explore the sublunary and the celestial worlds. The blockchain is the unmoved mover.
Why Maieutica
Socrates called his method maieutics. Through dialogue and patient questioning he accompanied his interlocutor until the knowledge already possessed could come out into the open.
OpenMaieutica does the same for research. It builds the conditions in which a rigorous, reproducible and verifiable truth can emerge on its own. The framework achieves this through an incentive to openness that rewards it and recognizes it, using the tools of Web3, such as blockchain, tokens and NFTs.
The logo represents exactly this: a spiral rises out of a block of the blockchain, where research takes on immutability, transparency and verifiability. It winds outward and leaves through the open O of Open Science, where it can reach everyone.
What the record must establish
Researchers are asked to self-declare their openness: pre-registration, data and code. As a consequence, today's open badges mean that someone, at some point, shared something, but that is neither verifiable nor easily retrievable. OpenMaieutica records the same claim immutably, timestamping the bytes of the resources themselves, so that it can be re-checked at any point in time. This cryptographic evidence of past existence makes Open Science future-proof.
A timestamp on a content hash, written to a public chain. A simple but powerful way to prove openness indisputably, and to show that the research went as planned.
The identifier is derived from the bytes. Change anything and the identifier changes, so an author can prove the results' integrity and reproducibility.
Not merely that it exists, but that the chain records it earlier. This is an algorithmic safeguard against HARKing, enforced by design.
A badge records history; a reader wants a download. Open badges attached directly to the resources makes them easily retrievable, through blockchain explorers and IPFS, or make it evident if they no longer exist.
The framework
OpenMaieutica's applications work together toward a verifiable, reproducible and rigorous science. OpenStamp, MeritCert and OpenExplorer already run on the Polygon Amoy testnet and the IPFS network. OpenAgora and OpenReview are still in design: they will complete the pipeline and turn the framework into a scientific community.
Running in local alpha, open beta testing coming soon
Alpha
Deposit and timestamp
The researcher's console with four slots: pre-registration, dataset, code, readme. Resources are deposited on IPFS, and the fingerprints of every folder and every single file are anchored on-chain in one batched transaction. One signature; a permanent record of what existed, and in which order.
Alpha
Verify and certify
The reviewer's and editor's console. It retrieves the package, re-derives the ordering from the registry, confirms the pre-registration was anchored first, and rewards authors with Merit Tokens and NFT Open Badges. The latter are minted for every open practice confirmed, with the review report attached. Badges and tokens are soulbound: they cannot be transferred or sold.
Alpha
Read the public record
The public view: studies, badges and the openness metric of Merit Scores (a weighted balance of Merit Tokens), with the issuer and the recipient of every badge on screen. It walks each package live to report what is still reachable on IPFS, matching pre-registrations with their datasets and code.
In design
In design
Incentivize and open up review
Reports anchored to the exact materials they judge, so a review travels with the study and the full picture of a paper stays together. Reviewers are rewarded for their fundamental contribution to science, with tokens and a unique open badge, certified and verifiable.
In design
The beating heart of science
The square where the community stops being an audience: a decentralized social network (DeSoc) for research, where everyone is involved. Replications are incentivized and registered against the original package, and dialogue becomes informed because discussions are attached to materials. Claims can be weighed against openness, and everyone gets credit for contributing to science.
Beyond the last heaven
Aristotle placed at the edge of the cosmos a mover that is itself unmoved: it changes nothing about itself, and everything else turns because of it. These three components preexist the framework and act as its fundamental engine. They record everything that happens before their eyes, while remaining unchanged. IPFS, The Graph and Polygon: the unmoved mover of OpenMaieutica.
The backbone
Decentralized repository
Where the materials live
The InterPlanetary File System addresses a file by what it contains, not by where it is deposited. Change one byte and the address changes; ask the network for a content identifier and you get exactly those bytes, or nothing at all. That is what makes a certified package impossible to swap, and what lets a reader years from now confirm that they are holding the same materials the authors used in their research, whether or not they are verified to still be retrievable.
Rewards and timestamping
Where the record is written
The public blockchain that carries the timestamps, the badges and the tokens. Three contracts hold the whole record: an append-only registry of fingerprints, an ERC-1155 contract that issues the NFT Open badges and an ERC-20 that mints Merit Tokens. Like the blockchain that hosts them, they cannot be edited, so no one can rewrite a timestamp, delete a token or revoke a badge after the fact. The alpha runs on the Amoy testnet.
The subgraph for queries
How the record is read back
A blockchain is quick to write to and slow to read from. A public subgraph indexes every badge as it is issued, so a researcher's whole portfolio can be assembled with a single query instead of by scanning the chain block by block. It is public: anyone can run the same query and get the same answer.
How it works
Order is evidence. A pre-registration only means something if the chain can show it was there before the data; a review can only be done when the resources are retrievable; and an open badge is only trusted when it can be checked, since it is attached to materials it certifies. The fourth move feeds the first: what is explored inspires new open research, a scientific ouroboros.
01
OpenStamp
Pre-registrations, datasets, codes are collected into a package on IPFS. Every file gets a content identifier derived from its own bytes, and a duplicate check says whether the world has seen it before.
02
OpenStamp
Root, folders and files are batched into a single transaction. Folder fingerprints prove a set is exactly what it was: pre-registrations cannot be amended, while datasets and code can be added later as an addendum.
03
MeritCert
A reviewer downloads the package, opens it, writes a report, and mints soulbound badges and tokens. The report itself is deposited and anchored alongside the badges.
04
OpenExplorer
Anyone with the author's wallet address or the fingerprint of a resource can re-run the whole check: who anchored what, when, who certified it, and whether the files can still be fetched right now.
Where it started
In Plato's allegory of the cave, prisoners are freed from the chains and stop believing in the shadows on the wall. Struggling to climb up the steep slope, they emerge to see the real world. Here they are enlightened by the Idea of the Good: now, they must go back and tell the others. Open Science is that very Idea, and this recording captures an earlier, more primordial version of our project: presented when it was still closer to Hyperuranion than to a working pipeline. Almost everything it shows has since changed shape, but the Idea has not. Emerging from the cave of irreproducible science is a laborious endeavour, and pioneering a new way forward is even more challenging. Yet if the Demiurge could craft a cosmos with nothing but Ideas and geometry, we can certainly build a better science with Open Science and the blockchain.
Thanks to Psicostat who invited me to discuss the Idea. Recorded before the current architecture. If the player does not load, watch it here.
The whitepaper is a living document, timestamped and deposited on IPFS. Every version can be traced back to the first.