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What ARIADNE is

ARIADNE is an open system for publishing science. Every action (publishing an article, reviewing it, voting, commenting, raising a flag) is a public, signed and permanent record. No editor decides what is published: what rises is what researchers with reputation in the same field judge to be good, and that reputation is earned, field by field, from the judgement of others.

The record lives on Algorand, a public blockchain. The texts live on IPFS, a network where a file is found by a fingerprint of its content. The website at ariadne.press is one window onto that record; anyone can build another.

What you can do

Section titled “What you can do”
  • Publish an article, short notes, an amendment to an earlier article, a dataset or a replication of someone else’s result. You choose its field (and optionally a second one) and you can name co-authors. See Publish an article.
  • Read everything, without an account and without paying.
  • Search the full text of every article, review and comment, and find people, with filters such as field, type, status, dates, DOI, ORCID, language and licence. A search is a link you can share. See Search.
  • Review an article with a recommendation (accept, minor revision, major revision, reject) and a written report. See Review an article.
  • Earn the Peer-reviewed seal for your article when qualified reviewers recommend it. See Get the Peer-reviewed seal.
  • Comment and reply, mention people with @name.algo or @ADDRESS, and vote for the articles, reviews and comments you find valuable. See Comment, mention and vote.
  • Flag an article you believe is plagiarised, fabricated or spam, once you have some reputation in its field. See Flag an article.
  • Follow researchers and get their publications, reviews and comments in your inbox, on every device, and turn on browser notifications. See Follow people and get notified.
  • Link your ORCID iD so that readers see your name and citations use it. It never changes your reputation. See Link your ORCID iD.
  • Get a DOI for an article through Zenodo (run by CERN). See Get a DOI with Zenodo.
  • Keep lists of articles, private or public, and turn any list into a bibliography. See Lists and bibliographies.
  • Cite any article in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, BibTeX or RIS, naming the exact version you read. See Cite an article.

Why it exists

Section titled “Why it exists”
  • Open access. Nobody pays to read or to publish. Each person pays only the small network costs of their own actions; the platform takes nothing and pays for nobody.
  • Nothing is deleted. Every version stays readable and every action stays on record. A retraction is a visible status, not an erasure.
  • No gatekeeper. Anyone can take part from the first day. Quality emerges from votes weighted by reputation in the field, not from the opinion of one editor.
  • Reputation is earned, not granted. It is public, it belongs to people rather than to journals, and it is separate for each field: being respected in medicine gives no weight in history.
  • Made to last. Articles are plain text (Markdown with LaTeX formulas) plus their own files, identified by a fingerprint of their content. Anyone can keep a copy, and in thirty years it will still be readable.
  • Independent of this website. The record lives on a public blockchain. Anyone can build another window onto the same data, and nobody, including the people who run ARIADNE, can alter the past.

What makes it different

Section titled “What makes it different”

Reviews and reputation in the open

Section titled “Reviews and reputation in the open”

Reviews are signed, public and permanent, like everything else. Each vote and each flag weighs according to the reputation its author has in the article’s main field, and reputation comes only from what other people think of your work: votes for your articles, reviews that others mark as useful, comments that others value. Nobody gains reputation from their own action, and it never decreases. The exact arithmetic is in Reputation and vote weight.

No paywall

Section titled “No paywall”

Reading needs nothing at all: no account, no wallet, no subscription. Publishing has no fee either. The only costs are Algorand’s network fee (about 0.001 ALGO per transaction) and a storage deposit for the records you create (about 0.21 ALGO to publish an article). Deposits are not paid to anyone: they stay locked in the protocol for as long as the record exists. See Costs and deposits.

The wallet is the identity

Section titled “The wallet is the identity”

There are no accounts and no passwords. A wallet app on your phone or computer holds a private key and signs each action; your public address is your identity. ARIADNE never sees your key. You can add a readable name (an NFD name ending in .algo) and link your ORCID iD, but the address is what the record holds. See Wallets and your address.

The Peer-reviewed seal

Section titled “The Peer-reviewed seal”

Anyone can publish, and publishing is immediate. The Peer-reviewed seal tells reviewed work apart: an article holds it while at least two reviews that count recommend it (accept or minor revision), more than ask for major revision or rejection. A review counts when its author knows the field, has no conflict of interest with the authors, and writes at least 200 words. The seal is computed in the open, so anyone can check it. See The Peer-reviewed seal.

Where the name comes from

Section titled “Where the name comes from”

In Greek myth Ariadne gave Theseus a thread to find his way out of the labyrinth. ARIADNE keeps a thread through the scientific record that anyone can follow back: who published what, which version, who reviewed it, who supported it. ARIADNE’s citation measure, the Thread Score, is named after that thread.

How ARIADNE is funded

Section titled “How ARIADNE is funded”

ARIADNE runs on donations. It has no fees, no token for sale, no advertising and no investors, and the deposits you pay when you act are locked in the application as storage: nobody receives them, the project included. Donations pay for the server that runs the indexer, the website and a copy of every article, for the domain and storage, and for development and an independent security review before MainNet. If ARIADNE is useful to you, you can support it.

Where to go next

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