Paperfax

Paperfax provides an open peer review process for academic articles which journals can use to rapidly establish consensus on the credibility of a paper. Our process rewards credible reviewers and provides funding opportunities to academics while supporting free and open information. By decentralizing the review-publication process and leveraging a tokenized incentive structure we aim to remove the systemic biases of traditional publishing, provide equitable access to verifiable information, and accelerate the research publication process. A paperfax can be initialized for any published work, and provides an interface for auditors to review and comment on issues with the paper, delivering verdicts on whether they consider the final result to be valid research.

We developed smart contracts in solidity and utilized command line tools like dapptools by dapphub. Once we had functioning smart contract we were able to deploy it to the Rinkeby testnet. There, we could submit transactions and test if the result was what we expected. Then we started a Moralis server for use as our Web3 backend, which we found very simple to set up and integrate into our project. We integrated a React/Typescript frontend using react-moralis and Web3.storage to store all Paperfax audits which we found clean and easy to use. React-moralis blew up the bundle size to 2+ MB and also requires some webpack hacks because of how much it pulled in from Node, but otherwise easy to code with.