ARTiFACTS Launches First-Ever Blockchain-Based Platform for Scientific and Scholarly Research

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and PHILADELPHIA, March 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cambridge, MA-based start-up ARTiFACTS has launched the world's first blockchain-based platform for scholarly research. Formed by a team of academic publishing software veterans, the new company is the first of its kind to deploy a collaborative platform that allows researchers to register their discoveries and provide and receive attribution on an immutable blockchain ledger.

The ARTiFACTS platform was designed to address the fundamental shortcomings of traditional knowledge dissemination and attribution. Currently, researchers only receive acknowledgment for a published article when it appears in an indexed journal, limiting exposure to the full scope of their research contributions. ARTiFACTS' blockchain-based platform allows researchers to create a permanent, real-time record of all research contributions in an unbreakable, universally-accessible digital ledger. With this new platform, ARTiFACTS has created a new infrastructure for cataloguing, searching, and attributing scholarly contributions.

The ARTiFACTS platform consists of the following primary elements:

• Collaboration Platform: A workflow management and collaboration tool leveraging an open source platform that allows researchers to manage projects and teams and share research findings, giving creators control of their content and instantly establishing proof-of-existence.

• Attribution Engine: An Ethereum blockchain engine that records a permanent, valid, and immutable ledger of record for all research findings and their cited/citing attributions, building a comprehensive, real-time, profile of scholarly contribution.

• Comprehensive Index: A community index of all research artifacts and linkages that speeds research by allowing discovery of the full spectrum of research outputs, not just published works.

"It's been 63 years since Eugene Garfield, the godfather of modern bibliometrics, started manually coding punch cards for mainframe computers to track research citations, but very little has changed since then," said ARTiFACTS President and Co-Founder, Courtney Morris. "We're still relying on manual coding of select published research stored in proprietary databases – an error-prone, time-consuming, and costly process."

"By moving this process onto a blockchain platform, we are rightfully recognizing research artifacts as digital assets and we're enabling all transactions and linkages among all types of artifacts – not just published works – in a fully open, immutable record," added Dave Kochalko, Chief Academic Officer and Co-Founder.

ARTiFACTS was founded by a team of executives with deep experience in primary and secondary academic publishing software, financial services technology, and media. The company's leadership team have all held senior management roles with the world's leading academic research, fintech, and educational technology providers, including Thomson Reuters (Web of Science and EndNote), Elsevier (Scopus), ORCID, and SunGard, among others.

The company's formal launch took place at the Eighteenth Population Health Colloquium in Philadelphia, PA, the seminal conference of healthcare industry leaders hosted by Thomas Jefferson University's Jefferson College of Population Health. ARTiFACTS announced at the event that in addition to launching its blockchain based workflow platform, it had created the first-ever archive specifically for the population health community for research artifacts of all types: pophealth.discoverresearch.ai

Researchers can go to sys.artifacts.ai to sign up and start collaborating, sharing and attributing.

About ARTiFACTS

ARTiFACTS provides a simple, user-friendly platform, purpose built for academic and scientific research that leverages blockchain technology. Researchers can record a permanent, valid, and immutable chain of records in real-time, from the earliest stages of research for all research artifacts, including citing/attribution transactions. While today's digital scholarship merely creates linkages among an artificially narrowed subset of indexed publications long after discoveries are made, ARTiFACTS focuses on capturing and linking knowledge from its initial ideation throughout the research process to informal and formal dissemination. By using the ARTiFACTS platform, researchers will be able to immutably prove ownership and existence of novel work, expand access to their research artifacts, provide and receive 'real-time' attribution for novel work and more comprehensively and rapidly build and demonstrate their body of scholarly contributions.

To learn more, visit us at artifacts.ai and follow us on Twitter @ARTiFACTS.ai.

Contact: John Roderick, 1-631-584-2200, [email protected]

SOURCE ARTiFACTS

Related Links

http://artifacts.ai