No Rights

Highly talented, outstandingly titled scientists are key-players in the peer-review editorial work for scientific and technical publishing, either as authors, editors or reviewers. Having such an important role nonetheless, they do not get paid a dime.

Scientific and technical publishing is a $26 billion industry, as big as the cinema industry. Publishing houses which are market leaders enjoy double-digit profit margins and base their business on exploiting authors, editors, and reviewers as a voluntary work force.

If this was not enough, authors must pay to publish, pay so that others can openly access their papers and, shockingly, must give away their copyright. Dissatisfaction among scientists is growing worldwide.

We are SciDAO

To help scientists and science to advance, we are collaboratively creating SciDAO. A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization running in the blockchain and using digital currencies. The scientific publication DAO or SciDAO is a community formed by highly qualified talents to collaborate on editorial work for publishing scientific papers and share financial gains.

Other initiatives are on the way the web3 space, but nevertheless there is no complete solution to date to serve as an alternative to the traditional scientific publishing system.

Exploitative, expensive, old-fashioned scientific publication companies

Incumbent publishing companies with the exploitative, old-fashioned asymmetric business models have been the same for more than a century. Popular scientific journals on STEM areas of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math charge $2 to 5k for publishing a paper. These journals use either high impact factor, journal citation indicator or persuasive psychological metrics such as high rejection indices. Nature, considered a top science journal charges $11k for a single paper.

Can we scientists do it ourselves?

Can we scientists collaboratively create a peer-review editorial system, pay less for publishing, get paid for work done and share financial gains?

We believe we can!

This SciDAO community is being formed by spreading out our manifest to prominent talented scientists, groups and associations, resonating their dissatisfaction with the prevailing scientific publications system through social media and events. As DAO, SciDAO can distribute governance and liquidity tokens.

A possible model

In the SciDAO publication process, scientists and authors will connect using digital wallets to a webpage, for example as in

and pay a fee to upload manuscripts using IPFS/ Filecoin. In our model, users will pay fees when submitting their manuscripts rather than to have them published. These manuscripts will be collected by SciDAO Editors at, for example,

which will distribute to Reviewers for peer-reviewing. Upon reviewing, Editors and Reviewers will get paid with part of the manuscript submission fee and DAO tokens. In addition, part of the submission fees goes to the DAO treasury while another part will pay for operations. When the manuscript is accepted for publication, at the author’s discretion, the paper may be minted as NFT for being sold or auctioned. NFTs of scientific papers will guarantee scientists, authors, co-authors, financial aides and, scientific institutions to uphold their intellectual property and to receive royalties in subsequent transactions.

Mainstream available to everybody

SciDAO aims to democratize access to scientists from all over the world which, despite their excellent work, do not to make it to mainstream journals.

SciDAO will also allow for scientists to keep paper copyrights and access to financial gains while offering at the same time an outstanding scientifically-sound peer-reviewed and aesthetically pleasant paper.

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