Proof of concept - Verifiability of scientific articles on blockchains using the Julia programming language

Internals & Design
1

Hi all!

1. What Is a Blockchain?

A blockchain is a distributed database that is shared among the nodes of a computer network. As a database, a blockchain stores information electronically in digital format. Blockchains are best known for their crucial role in cryptocurrency systems, such as Bitcoin, for maintaining a secure and decentralized record of transactions. The innovation with a blockchain is that it guarantees the fidelity and security of a record of data and generates trust without the need for a trusted third party.

2. Concept

  1. Most scientific articles are written in .pdf, .docx, .doc etc - I was thinking of creating a way to verify/authenticate scientific articles based on blockchain technology - since blockchain technology allows data to be secure, transparent, accessible and cannot be changed
  2. Each university, university, research and teaching institution, etc. has clear processes for verifying a scientific article - for example, there is a falsifiability criterion, as well as a peer verification criterion, etc.
  3. One thing I wanted would be to prove a concept: blockchain to prevent any scientific fraud - I trust science and technology and would like to help the world in this regard
  4. I wonder if this could be a good idea or not
  5. I thought about creating this algorithm in Julia - my goal is just to prove a concept of authenticity, decentralization, immutability, auditability in pdfs
  6. I don’t want to use .docx, .doc - those binary formats are usually closed source, as far as I’m aware pdf is an open binary format.

3. My doubts are these

  1. Is this idea a good idea or a bad idea?
  2. Is it possible to create a blockchain for scientific articles?
  3. Does Julia programming language have any official library to create, read, change pdf files?
  4. Does Julia programming language have any official library to create and/or to maintain blockchains?

4. Notes

  1. The links that are only bibliographic references
  2. It’s just a proof of concept
  3. I don’t want to criticize anything, just make things better.
  4. This project would be open source with the mit license
  5. Criterion of falsifiability, in the philosophy of science, a standard of evaluation of putatively scientific theories, according to which a theory is genuinely scientific only if it is possible in principle to establish that it is false.

5. References

2

There is absolutely nothing the blockchain could do that would prevent the sorts of scientific fraud people are worried about.

2 Likes
3

Hi! @Mason

Note

Accuracy is the proximity of a result to its actual reference value. Thus, the higher the level of accuracy, the closer to the reference or real value is the result found.

Feedback

  1. My idea would be to have a p2p network with several scientists - then we could see with a higher rate of certainty if that article is something relevant or not - it would be an “accuracy criterion”
  2. I’m not criticizing the current scientific verification system as I said, just trying to create an algorithm that does things automatically - perhaps based on these principles, criteria
  3. But… what you said makes perfect sense, I’m going to leave this idea shelved, let this idea go, this idea from what I’ve realized is not a good idea.
  4. Thank you very much for the feedback.