About ARIADNE

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.

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.

This page has two parts. In short is for everyone. In detail explains exactly how it works, down to the arithmetic of reputation.

In short

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.
Read everything, without an account and without paying.
Review an article with a recommendation (accept, minor revision, major revision, reject) and a written report.
Comment and reply, mention people with @name.algo or @ADDRESS, and vote for the articles, reviews and comments you find valuable.
Flag an article you believe is plagiarised, fabricated or spam, once you have some reputation in its field.
Follow researchers: their publications, reviews and comments appear in your inbox, on every device, because the follow is recorded on the blockchain.
Link your ORCID iD to your address: readers then see your name, citations use it, and co-authors can find you by your iD. It never changes your reputation, which is earned here.
Get a DOI for an article through Zenodo (run by CERN): ARIADNE prepares a draft in your Zenodo account, you publish it there and declare its DOI here. The record is a third preserved copy and is indexed by scholarly search engines.
Cite any article in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, BibTeX or RIS, naming the exact version you read, its DOI when it has one, and the authors' names from their verified ORCID records.

Why it exists

Open access. Nobody pays to read or to publish. Each person pays only the small network costs of their own actions (see costs below); 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. This website is one window onto it; anyone can build another one from the same data, and nobody, including the people who run ARIADNE, can alter the past.

How ARIADNE is funded

ARIADNE runs on donations. It has no fees, no token, 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, this 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.

What the blockchain does here, in plain words

A public notary. The blockchain (Algorand) is a shared record that thousands of computers keep identical. Once an action is written there, it has a date, an author and an order that nobody can change afterwards.
Your wallet is your signature. You do not create an account with a password. 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.
Texts live on IPFS, their fingerprints on the blockchain. The article itself is stored on IPFS, a network where a file is found by its fingerprint (its CID) instead of its location. The blockchain keeps that fingerprint, so any change to the text would be detected immediately.
Costs are small and visible. Each action pays a network fee of about 0.001 ALGO and, when it creates a record, a storage deposit (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, which is forever. The website always shows the exact total before your wallet asks you to sign.

TestNet and MainNet

ARIADNE currently runs on TestNet, Algorand's public test network, where ALGO are free (TestNet dispenser). Everything works exactly as it will on MainNet, but articles and reputation on TestNet are for testing and carry no value on MainNet. MainNet opens after an independent audit of the contract; the two networks never mix.

TestNet restarted on 1 October 2026 with the contract that adds ORCID iDs, DOIs and follows. What was published on the previous TestNet application (772965337) stays on the blockchain and its content stays pinned on ARIADNE's IPFS node, but it is no longer listed here; you can publish the same content again.

In detail

What is on the blockchain, and what is not

The ARIADNE contract on Algorand stores, for every article: its number, its author (the publishing address), its primary and secondary fields, its type, the article it amends (if any), its status, its version number, the fingerprints of its current and previous versions, its dates, the total weight of the votes it received and how many, its declared co-authors and who confirmed, its reviews, comments, votes and flags. The text and its figures are on IPFS; the blockchain holds their 36-byte fingerprint (a CIDv1 with sha2-256).

The contract cannot be modified or deleted: it has no update path, and the account that deployed it has no privileges left. Everything this website shows (the feed, profiles, the inbox) is computed from the blockchain by the ARIADNE indexer, and anyone can recompute it.

Each publication also creates an article token: a non-transferable token (Algorand standard ARC-71) that proves authorship in any wallet. Claiming it into your wallet is optional; once claimed it is frozen there, and nobody, not even you, can move it. Its metadata always points to the article's current version (ARC-19).

The life of an article

Status	Meaning	How it gets there
preprint	first public version	publishing
under review	the author invites reviews	the author
final	the author considers it complete	the author, from under review
disputed	enough flags were raised; under examination	automatically, by flags
retracted	withdrawn; still readable, permanently marked	the author at any time, or governance after a dispute

New versions are possible while the article is a preprint or under review; each one changes the fingerprint and keeps the previous ones on record. An amendment is a separate publication that points to the article it corrects.

You can...	preprint	under review	final	disputed	retracted
publish a new version	yes	yes	no	no	no
review it	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
vote for it, or for its reviews and comments	yes	yes	yes	no	no
claim reputation from it	yes	yes	yes	no	no
comment on it	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
flag it	yes	yes	yes	yes	no

Co-authors

The co-authors are declared when the article is published (up to 25 addresses) and the list can never change: nobody can be added or removed later. Each co-author confirms by signing from their own wallet. A declared co-author who votes for the article or reviews it can no longer confirm; a confirmed author can never vote for, review or flag their own article.

Vote weight

Every vote, review recommendation and flag is weighted by the reputation of the person in the primary field of the article at that moment:

w = 1 + \left\lfloor \sqrt{\text{reputation}} \right\rfloor

Reputation in the field	0	1	4	9	25	100	400	2 500	10 000
Weight of a vote	1	2	3	4	6	11	21	51	101

The square root keeps influence growing slowly: a newcomer counts, and an expert counts more, but never overwhelmingly. Each person votes once per article, review or comment, and a vote can never be changed or withdrawn.

How reputation is earned

Reputation is a whole number per address and per field. It never decreases, and nobody ever gains reputation from their own action.

When someone else...	who gains	in which field	how much
votes for an article	each confirmed author, when they claim it	the article's primary field, and half of that in its secondary field	a share of the article's total vote weight (below)
marks a review as useful	the reviewer, immediately	the article's primary field	3 × the voter's weight (nothing if the voter is an author of the article)
votes for a comment	the commenter, immediately	the article's primary field	the voter's weight ÷ 5, rounded down
the author resolves a comment	the commenter, immediately	the article's primary field	5

A vote for a comment from someone whose weight is below 5 (reputation below 16) is recorded but grants nothing.

Daily limit. An address can gain at most 50 reputation per field per day (a UTC day), from all sources together. For reviews and comments, whatever exceeds the day's limit is lost. For articles nothing is lost: what cannot be claimed today stays claimable on later days.

Article reputation, exactly. Votes for an article do not move anyone's reputation when they are cast; they add up in the article as its total weight $T$ . The article has $N = 1 + \text{declared co-authors}$ equal shares, fixed when it was published. Then:

a confirmed co-author is entitled to $\lfloor T / N \rfloor$ ;
the publishing author is entitled to $\lceil T / N \rceil$ (the remainder of the division goes to them);
each author claims with their own transaction: the claim adds to their primary-field reputation what they are entitled to and have not claimed yet, up to what the daily limit still allows, and adds half of that amount (rounded down) to the secondary field, if the article has one and within that field's own daily limit;
a claim is refused when there is nothing new to claim, or when the day's limit in the primary field is already used up;
the share of a declared co-author who never confirms is never claimed by anyone;
reputation not claimed before an article is retracted is lost.

Worked example. An article with two declared co-authors ( $N = 3$ ) receives votes of weight 1, 2, 3 and 5: $T = 11$ . Each confirmed co-author is entitled to $\lfloor 11/3 \rfloor = 3$ , the publishing author to $\lceil 11/3 \rceil = 4$ . When the publishing author claims, their reputation in the primary field grows by 4 and in the secondary field by 2. If the article later receives a vote of weight 4 ( $T = 15$ ), each author can claim one more share: 5 in total each, so 2 more for the co-authors and 1 more for the publishing author.

Flags and disputes

To flag an article you need at least 10 reputation in its primary field. A flag weighs like a vote, $1 + \lfloor \sqrt{\text{reputation}} \rfloor$ . When the flags of the current round add up to 30, the article becomes disputed: votes and reputation claims pause, reviews and comments continue. Governance then decides: cleared returns the article to the status it had, retracted retracts it. Each address flags once per round, flags are permanent, and a new round starts from zero.

Governance

Governance is a single address with two powers only: registering new fields (the OECD list of 42 fields is already registered) and resolving disputes. It cannot edit, hide or delete anything, and it cannot change the rules. It is a post-quantum account (Falcon-1024 signatures, available on Algorand since version 5.0), so that it stays secure even against future quantum computers; it will move to a post-quantum multi-signature account when Algorand offers one.

What each action costs

Action	Storage deposit (ALGO)
Publish	0.2122, plus 0.0293 per declared co-author
Confirm co-authorship, resolve a comment	0
Follow, link an ORCID iD, declare a DOI	0
Vote for an article	0.0289
Vote for a review or a comment	0.0321
Review	0.0911 the first time in a field, then 0.0658
Comment	0.0818 the first time in a field, then 0.0565
Claim reputation	0.0253 per field the first time, then 0
Flag	0.0265
Claim the article token	0.1 kept in your own account while you hold the token

On top, each transaction pays the network fee (currently 0.001 ALGO per transaction; a publication is three). The website reads the exact amounts from the network and shows them before you sign.

What runs outside the blockchain

The indexer reads every ARIADNE transaction and builds the feed, the profiles and the inbox. It also downloads each article from IPFS, checks that it is complete and that its header matches what was declared on the blockchain (a mismatch is shown as a warning, never hidden), and keeps a second copy so that articles stay available.
The website is this interface. Your wallet signs; the website only prepares transactions and shows their cost.
ORCID and DOI checks. Linking an ORCID iD or declaring a DOI is recorded on the blockchain; whether it is true is checked outside it. The indexer reads the public ORCID record (it must list your ARIADNE profile among its websites) and the Zenodo or DataCite record of a DOI (it must say it is identical to the article and to that version's content), then rechecks every week. Only verified iDs and DOIs are shown to readers.
Zenodo drafts. When you ask for a DOI, ARIADNE's server prepares the draft in your Zenodo account with the permission you give on Zenodo (creating drafts, never publishing). The permission lasts at most an hour and is kept only in a sealed cookie in your browser.
Names. Where an address has a name ending in .algo, the website shows it. These names come from NFD (Non-Fungible Domains), a naming service on Algorand: the owner of an address chooses the name and proves the address is theirs. The name is a convenience, not a certificate of identity, and the full address is always one click away. The picture next to a name is the NFD avatar its owner chose, or a pattern generated from the address. ARIADNE's server asks NFD for the names, so your browser never contacts NFD. A mention written as @name.algo notifies the address verified for that name when the comment is sent, and that address is what the blockchain records.

The indexer and the website can be rebuilt by anyone from the blockchain alone, which is the ultimate record; the ORCID and DOI checks are asked again from those services.

Known limits

One person can create several addresses. Groups of fresh addresses that vote for each other gain reputation slowly (weight 1 each, the square root and the daily limit damp it) but they are not prevented. Stronger protections are planned after the first phase.
Reputation does not decay over time.
Governance is one signer until post-quantum multi-signature accounts exist.
Follows, ORCID links and DOI declarations are public and permanent. Anyone can see who follows whom and which iD an address declared. Unfollowing or unlinking marks them inactive; the history stays on the blockchain.
A Zenodo record cannot be deleted once published, even if the article is later retracted here; its description can still be edited on Zenodo.

To publish, read the publishing guide.