Good Day! This is PLUTO team.

We are a Dapp(Decentralized Application) development start-up that aim to decentralize scholarly communication. We are currently preparing for ICO and are in the Proof of Concept development phase.

In this blog, We will share various postings such as the progress of the team. We hope to get a lot of interest and feedback from you. This first posting is a brief introduction about PLUTO.

Problem in scholarly Communication

Scholarly communication is a system that has a cycle of production, evaluation, distribution, preservation, and utilization of research and other scholarly works. The main means of such a system is publishing research papers, which summarize research achievements in logical form and distribute them through journals. Paper publication is one indicator that the researchers have received minimal recognition from the academic community about the importance, validity, and novelty of their research achievements, and is used as an assessment of a researcher’s performance.

Publishers who owns journals perform all the processes of validation, publication and distribution for academic publishing. As a result, publishers have had tremendous influence at the heart of scholarly communication, and they have created excessive commercial profits out of it. Problems such as high subscription fees, complicated publishing processes, and lack of transparency in the procedures show how bad scholarly communication has gone. Also, contrary to the past, when its major purpose was the 'communication' and 'discussion', current scholarly communication is losing value by relying only on paper publications. As a result, researchers have wasted resources due to pressures on publishing and lack of communication around researchers within same fields, thus deteriorating the whole academic progression. The Open Access(OA) publication model, which appeared to solve this problem, not only became a new revenue source for publishers, but also created an underqualified predatory OA journals, which lowers the trust and quality of scholarly communication.

Therefore, PLUTO aims to provide an autonomous and advanced scholarly communication powered by contribution of the participants, implementing the intermediary role of the existing publishers into the blockchain.

Introducing PLUTO, Decentralized scholarly Communication platform

PLUTO is a Decentralized Scholarly Communication Platform, a DApp that enables the sharing of research achievements over the Ethereum Network. The basic concept is to decentralize the existing inefficient, centralized scholarly communication by distributing the role to the major players of the system, the researchers.

PLUTO implements an autonomous platform for participants to create, validate and distribute their content, with the premise that all activities are transparently disclosed.

Participants in PLUTO's ecosystem are researcher, funding agency and research institution.
Researchers are the main contributor to the platform. They act as author, reviewer, and reader. Funding agencies provide funding for research, and Research institutions include research institutes, libraries, and universities that support research activities.

The core activity of the platform is that shared research outputs are verified and distributed through the evaluation of autonomous contributions from a large number of peer researchers. Then, researchers will receive reasonable reward as they have contributed to scholarly communication. Also, platform connects researchers. Beyond exchanging simple questions and answers, researchers can request for significant inquiries such as an experiment with large resource requirements, through a contract on the platform. Distribution of resources for research can be achieved efficiently through PLUTO platform as well, including but not limited to: crowdfunding for research, recruiting for research, renting equipments/facility for research, and etc. PLUTO’s ultimate goal is to make transparent, reasonable, and efficient all the processes involved in improving the whole Academia.

The details of the solutions will be discussed in detail in the following postings.

In PLUTO, researchers can receive more reliable evaluations from peer researchers at a reasonable cost, and communications are made much more efficient as various unnecessary procedures are omitted. In addition, researchers will be recognized their contributions to academic progression as they share their research achievements and review other’s, rather than concentrating solely on the number of publications. In the end, PLUTO helps to make constructive progress in entire academic society.

We believe that saving time and money wasted due to inefficient communication and leveraging it for actual research will accelerate the pace of scholarly development as a result.