OpSci Verse: The Decentralized Science Society Portal

OpSci is the Open Science DAO, a web-native community of scientists, engineers, and activists building public goods to streamline research and innovation

What is this?

Verse is a decentralized science society portal with the goal to onboard 1,000 open science researchers to web3.

Demo here --> https://cln.sh/Y7K8Fjl2

Why should I care?

Science is merging with software. Modern digital science tools are designed to enhance productivity and the efficiency of research but are inaccessible to individual researchers or the knowledge-seeking public.

Knowledge is Power, and Power is for the People Knowledge will be gated as long as we rely on centralized service providers and institutions. Digital science's (as a service) primary goal is to monetize human labor, scientific insight, and creativity into revenue streams for entrenched institutions.

The Current System is Broken Currently, scientists conflate their identity and self-worth with that of the gate-keepers, keeping them locked into a outdated and ineffective system.

Self Sovereign Science is the Future Our team believes that self-sovereignty through cryptography is one of the best way researchers can assert intellectual ownership of their digital works.

Cryptography is the way Web3 technology is a path forward for plural communities of self-sovereign researchers that own their intellectual output, are free to associate and collaborate on their own terms, and take ownership of their reputation.

How does this work?

1. Researchers seeking to join a DeSci Society navigate to verse.opsci.io to create an account with their email address.

2. New users verify their credentials and import their academic activity from services such as ORCID, Figshare, or OSF.

3. Next, users create a digital identity. This can be completely public, or pseudonymous using ZK proofs to verify their credentials. Each verified digital identity is minted as a "hypercertificate" that tracks the impact of their research based on their imported activity. Once minted, the user will be assigned a .desci.eth subdomain.

4. Verified accounts can apply to join listed societies in the registry. Researchers aren't defined by their affiliation and are encouraged to be interdisciplinary to maximize their impact metrics.

5. Gitcoin donors, grant makers, and philanthropists can directly fund impactful researchers by donating to receive a fraction of their hypercertificate. Society membership also unlocks custom hypercertificates that users can mint by completing tasks, or challenges.

How will we do this?

We've developed a novel software architecture with the Holonym team that allows a researcher to create a truly non-custodial web3 wallet using just an email address and interact with DeSci protocols without worrying about gas, crypto tokens, nonce's, or seed phrases.

Phase I (2023-2024)

We will release the alpha version of the application with a group of early testers selected from DeSci DAOs. We will test a pilot with the following features:

• Non-custodial Account with Web3 Wallet
• Gasless Transactions
• Identity Linking + Verification
• Identity Hypercertificate Minting
• Society Creation

Phase II (2024-2025)

We plan to partner with 10 professional scientific societies to offer them the following services:

• SSO for enterprise account management This includes single sign on scoped within the organization domain running on a web3 backend.
• Digital identity verification We will provide KYC services to verify academic credentials of applicants, preventing fraud and abuse and increasing the reach of the society to a global talent pool.
• Data linking services Societies can more easily track and represent the academic accomplishment of their members. For example) science conference posters can be linked to identities belonging to a specific society.
• Badging and honorariums Organizations can recognize outstanding members that embody the mission of the society or solve outstanding problems using custom hypercertificates. Organizations can incentivize specific behaviors (i.e. open data sharing) through membership tiers and bounties.
• Crowdfunding and IP sharing Organizations can mint custom hypercertificates to raise funds for a specific scientific challenge (i.e. build an open source MRI) and support their members with grants. Hypercerts can represent fractional ownership in the published materials, providing royalty streams to support the organization and its mission
• Custom Hypercertificate Minting + Management
• Gitcoin Grant Protocol for Verified Hypercerts

Phase III (2025 and on)

We will open up Verse for open registration; first for new societies that request to be listed, second for all users. This will coincide with the progressive decentralization of the project. Hypercertificate NFTs will be used for governance to decide on the future of the project such as:

• Verse Protocol Fees
• Support for Select Academic Web Services
• Community Rules for Listing
• Structure and Composition of Funding Rounds
• Community Coda on IP ownership

Ok great, but can the team pull it off?

Our team is an all-star cast of researchers with experience working in non-profits, open source engineering, and have been involved in the DeSci space since 2020.

How can I learn more?

Check out https://verse.opsci.xyz

You can also track our progress on our blogs:

https://pulse.opsci.io/provable-and-computable-identity-for-future-proof-scientific-workflows-b020cdea11e3

https://medium.com/holonym/from-public-web-account-linking-to-general-use-zero-knowledge-proofs-47b1fd9ad55c

Underlying Technology

• Holonym (Zero Knowledge Proofs, SSO)
• ENS Subdomains Under DeSci.eth
• Deployed on Optimism
• Hyper-certificates
• Gitcoin Protocol