Last updated a year ago
PubWeave is an academic publishing platform with a peer review payment system deployed on Cardano's mainnet that lacks distributed decision-making mechanisms and mainstream awareness.
A three-pronged solution that includes a marketing communication plan (user attraction), UI/UX enhancements (user retention), and on/off-chain moderation and governance tools (value proposition).
This is the total amount allocated to PubWeave: Decentralized Peer Reviews.
Please provide your proposal title
PubWeave: Decentralized Peer Reviews
Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA
300000
Please specify how many months you expect your project to last
12
Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated
No
Original Language
en
What is the problem you want to solve?
PubWeave is an academic publishing platform with a peer review payment system deployed on Cardano's mainnet that lacks distributed decision-making mechanisms and mainstream awareness.
Supporting links
Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?
Yes
Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'
This is a joint venture between Intellart (legal name: Neurocan Inc.), Thespian d.o.o., and Puzzlewood Communication Inc.. Intellart has been partnering with these 2 trusted entities since PubWeave's inception in 2022/2023.
Will your project's outputs be fully open source?
Yes
License and Additional Information
Smart contracts and infrastrucutre tooling which make up the bulk of this proposal will be made open source under the MIT License [https://opensource.org/license/mit]. Fixes and enhancements to the platform itself (www.pubweave.com) will not be open-source for security and privacy reasons.
Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal
RWA
Describe your established collaborations.
Thespian d.o.o. (https://thespian.eu)
Puzzlewood Communication Inc. (https://puzzlewood.ca)
Describe funding commitments.
Note: ADA has been hovering between 1 CAD and 1 USD. For simplity and to round things up, we will assume 1 ADA == 1 (CAD or USD or EUR).
Intellart has commited to pay Puzzlewood $40k for marcom initiatives over the length of this proposal (1-year) as is evidenced by Puzzlewood's marketing plan for PubWeave: https://www.pubweave.com/files/Puzzlewood_Marcom_Catalyst.pdf.
Thespian has also promised a FTE over 6 months, totalling around $60k. Communication was internal, but proof can be provided on demand.
Describe your key performance metrics.
Once this proposal is accepted, we will build a dashboard with real time data about:
With each milestone, we will also have:
Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem
Introduction
Cardano has always touted itself as being a 3rd generation blockchain whose foundation is based on peer reviewed literature. PubWeave aims to bring the process to a full-circle by using Cardano's eUTxO model to further democratize peer reviews, adding a level of transparency and accountability only a blockchain-based solution can achieve.
PubWeave is a product of Project Catalyst Fund9, whose mainnet deployment was showcased in the completion report (https://www.pubweave.com/blog/pubweave-close-out-report-catalyst-fund-9) and video (https://youtu.be/Ecga56irC38).
In our Fund 9 submission, the two major critiques from community reviewers were our lack of details regarding our partnerships and the low funding amount relative to the scope of the proposal. Both are correct and are addressed in detail here.
Partnerships
Thespian's developers have been the powerhouse behind PubWeave's current form, and they will providing fullstack development over the course of 6 months, if this project is accepted. The biggest evidence of Thespian's work is the PubWeave platform itself: www.pubweave.com.
Puzzlewood have been a tremendous help in crafting Intellart's positioning narrative and have laid out a marketing communication plan for PubWeave based on their many years of expertise. You read their detailed plan at https://www.pubweave.com/files/Puzzlewood_Marcom_Catalyst.pdf.
The rest, including smart contracts, APIs, devops and overall management of the platform are undertaken by our own team at Intellart.
Funding
One third of the funding will be going to the partners, while the rest will go to Intellart. After years of working on PubWeave, we now have a good grasp on our burn rate and costs. We are confident the requested funds are in line with the promises put forth in this proposal.
Separation of concerns
A product life cycle's feedback loop is cross-disciplinary. In other words, a user discovering a bug requires a developer to fix the bug, and a developer's job is to make a good product... but it's the users that ultimately decide if the product is good! This stresses the importance of having an early user-base while finishing up the product. "If you wait until you're ready, you're too late".
For maximum efficiency, we are engaging in parallel the comms team (Puzzlewood), the fullstack team (Thespian) and the technology architects (Intellart), forming the 3 main axes of this proposal.
Axis 1: Comms
We start with this axis because that was our most lacking aspect from the previous fund. We trie raising awareness for PubWeave through organic growth (i.e., publish scientific news blog posts, tweet about them and hope for engagement), a strategy we discuss in our article on the subject: https://www.pubweave.com/blog/marketing-strategies-for-an-online-publishing-platform, but with ambivalent results, we decided we needed a solid, consistent and professional plan, which will be delivered by a professional marcom agency.
Taken from Puzzlewood's MARKETING PLAN TO GROW THE PUBWEAVE COMMUNITY:
This proposal outlines a phased 12-month marketing and communications program for PubWeave, focused on foundational, high-impact activities. The objective is to build a credible brand, establish a strong digital footprint with a central landing page for marcom activities, and engage the academic community through targeted outreach.
OBJECTIVES
Axis 2: Fullstack
In the Information Age, user experience is paramount: we can have an excellent tech design, but if the experience is too complex, the graphical interface is buggy or wait times are too high, all the hard work on the backend would be lost. PubWeave is a fully working product and we and others have created many articles on it, but our UI/UX task list is still very long, and with each new usage, we discover areas to enhance. This part should not be very controversial.
Axis 3: System architecture on the blockchain
This is the core of this proposal. PubWeave's value proposition is to enable peer-to-peer peer review payments for scientific articles (hope you could read that sentence!). As a quick reminder, in academia, peer reviewers are not paid (for better or worse), scientific journals gatekeepe publicly-funded research outputs and have a monopoly on the review process (e.g., why do we need exactly 3 reviewers?). Our article on overlay journals (https://www.pubweave.com/blog/incentivized-overlay-journal-revolutionizing-reviews) explores an idea put forth by proponents of preprints. We also dive deep into other aspects of scientific publishing in our PubWeave articles for those interested.
PubWeave's current mainnet functionality (in short) is to provide authors with the option to lock funds in a smart contract that get disbursed to a reviewer once the job is done. See: https://www.pubweave.com/blog/blockchain-meets-scientific-reviews.
At the time we submitted PubWeave's Fund 9 close-out video (https://youtu.be/Ecga56irC38) our future steps included a moderation system for dispute resolution and a bounty functionality in the smart contract. This was completed recently and can be seen in this video's demo: https://youtu.be/CRM0vBQeT8Q.
PubWeave's peer review functionality was always meant to become self-governing. With enough users, an admin should not be necessary for conflict resolution. As is with Catalyst, veteran users with enough experience can act as moderators tasked with resolving conflicts between author and reviewer.
Another functionality planned for PubWeave is a general purpose treasury controlled by a DAO (our PanDAO toolset has been laying the foundation for it). To fill the treasury, a small fee will be added to the peer review validator that fills the treasury, and to control it, a PubWeave token will need to be issued to long-term users of the platform. We have sketched a tokenomics model for this use-case, and this proposal will allow us to implement it. To read it: https://www.pubweave.com/blog/revenue-sharing-model-publishing.
As mentioned in the article, tokens will not be designed to hold value, but will be used as 'currency' to perform actions on the platform. If a market forms organically, then tokens will have a price, if not, power-users on PubWeave will be able to perform more actions.
However, if we want to design an onchain reputation system for moderators, basing it on tokens that can be transferred would make the system easily gameable. As such, tokens will have a dual role:
Implementing point number 2 will require a snapshot of the history of ownership of the tokens, where only those coming from PubWeave's smart contract will be counted. This can be thought of as the opposite of blacklisting addresses, where tokens from a whitelist (smart contract) are counted, turning the address into a sort of DID.
Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community
This project is a RWA project by its nature. That said, the smart contract that holds the funds transferred by authors while waiting for reviewers to take a job can be queried and TVL and volume metrics can be computed. This project is not a DeFi project by any means, but similar metrics can be constructed: TVL, volume, transaction fees, users attracted to Cardano through PubWeave. These are definitely a net positive for the ecosystem.
To date, Cardano doesn't have a native DeSci project, which is a growing industry in other ecosystems, namely EVM. PubWeave is well-positioned to become a big player in Cardano's DeSci space.
We will build a dashboard, containing user count, TVL, volume and total of transaction fee that will be available to the community in real time.
In addition, we will keep publishing reports on PubWeave as we did in our last proposal, summarizing successes, difficulties and lessons learned.
What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?
Axis 1: Puzzlewood
Our experience with Puzzlewood and their track record indicate that not only are their marketing communication skills one of the best in the industry, their low-friction, accessibility and low-overhead costs make them a valuable team player in a fast-evolving environment where feedback loops need to drive constant decisions.
Axis 2: Thespian
Thespian are not new to the Cardano ecosystem, they are a household name and many of their members are well known in the Cardano community. Our experience with them the past 3 years have only proven that they are more than capable to deliver on their tasks and the products we have built with them (www.pubweave.com and marketplace.pubweave.com) are a testament to this.
Axis 3: Intellart
We have been involved in the Cardano ecosystem for 4 years, have delivered on our projects and learned valuable lessons in terms of funds management. It is easy to overpromise on a technology we are not familiar with, and we are confident that it is not the case. Our team lead, Albert Feghaly, is well acquainted with the eUTxO model and leads the treasury smart contract development within PubWeave, now into its fourth iteration. Albert also has devops experience and is involved with PubWeave's deployment.
In terms of feasibility, there is no indication that what we are proposing will have unsurmountable hurdles, technologically or financially. We also think we have allocated an equally fair amount to marketing, UI/UX and blockchain development.
Milestone Title
Foundation and Digital Presence
Milestone Outputs
Acceptance Criteria
The reviewer will receive a report clearly detailing the outputs from the 3 different axes and the interplay between them. User feedback will be included alongside the updates to PubWeave. If no user feedback was gathered early on, before/after reports should make the bug fixes and new features clear.
Evidence of Completion
A report will contain the milestone outputs from: marketing, UI/UX, blockchain and other developments deemed relevant.
Delivery Month
3
Cost
60000
Progress
20 %
Milestone Title
Platform ‘Launch’ and Foundational Content
Milestone Outputs
Acceptance Criteria
The reviewer will receive a report clearly detailing the outputs from the 3 different axes and the interplay between them. User feedback will be included alongside the updates to PubWeave. Tokenomics simulations reports will be included. Testnet experimentation of tokenomics smart contracts.
Evidence of Completion
A report will contain the milestone outputs from: marketing, UI/UX, blockchain and other developments deemed relevant.
Delivery Month
5
Cost
60000
Progress
40 %
Milestone Title
Community Engagement and Education
Milestone Outputs
Acceptance Criteria
The reviewer will receive a report clearly detailing the outputs from the 3 different axes and the interplay between them. This should be the last major PubWeave UI milestone. Treasury and smart contract fees being completed, the focus will shift from web2 UI/UX toward blockchain upgrades.
Evidence of Completion
A report will contain the milestone outputs from: marketing, UI/UX, blockchain and other developments deemed relevant.
Delivery Month
8
Cost
60000
Progress
60 %
Milestone Title
Mainnet tokenomics
Milestone Outputs
Acceptance Criteria
The reviewer will receive a report clearly detailing the outputs from the 3 different axes and the interplay between them. The focus here will be on tokenomics, dual token roles and real life examples.
Evidence of Completion
A report will contain the milestone outputs from: marketing, UI/UX, blockchain and other developments deemed relevant.
Delivery Month
10
Cost
60000
Progress
80 %
Milestone Title
Growth, Onboarding and Measurement
Milestone Outputs
Acceptance Criteria
The reviewer will receive a final report and close-out video with a clear summary of the work that was performed, detailing the outputs from the 3 different axes and the challenges, successes and lessons from this strategy.
Evidence of Completion
A report will contain the milestone outputs from: marketing, UI/UX, blockchain and other developments deemed relevant.
Delivery Month
12
Cost
60000
Progress
100 %
Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources
Marketing
UI/UX
Blockchain
Unforeseen circumstances
Note: ADA has been hovering between 1 CAD and 1 USD. For simplity and to round things up, we will assume 1 ADA == 1 (CAD or USD or EUR).
How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?
By increasing dApp use-cases in the Cardano ecosystem, attracting academics and blog writers to a platform where Cardano onboarding is built-in, PubWeave can unlock new liquidity, interest, and positive feedback loops.
Academics decry scientific journals more and more, and peope are looking for a change to the status-quo. What other than a blockchain-based, transparent and accountable system to convince people to hop over and test what it is we are offering.
Terms and Conditions:
Yes
Albert Feghaly
Rebecca Johnston
Dominik Sipic
Mateo Martinjak