Welcome to DeSci Nodes

Elevate your research • Product introduction

Dear users Please note that we are currently working hard on updating Nodes/Publish. We are developing new features and designs faster than we can update the user guide. As such, the guide is often out of date. Please bear with us, and send us any questions if you cannot find your answer in this User Guide.

Welcome to our newest version of Nodes, a platform for publishing all your research-related materials.

Read below to learn about DeSci Nodes and the technology behind it, visit the DeSci Labs website to check out who we are, or jump straight to the user guide and learn how to share your research, data, code, etc as an integrated publication on the decentralized web through Nodes.

Dear early adopters 🤗

Thank you. It's still early, and your feedback, participation and interaction count tremendously. We're currently providing every early adopter with 100 gigabytes of online data to use in their Nodes profile.

Quick Links

User Docs Quick Start

Protocol Infrastructure

Background Info

Introduction

DeSci Nodes is an (inter)active online platform that lets researchers share and curate research objects. Research objects are integrated publications, which contain a broad range of components such as manuscripts, data, code, and all other (digital) files and objects related to research (components).

Sharing components alongside manuscripts isn't just good practice in open science, but it directly benefits you and the researchers as well. It's been shown that publishing data alongside publications increases the reach of scientific work, with indicators such as citations increasing by up to 100%. Read more about this here and here.

Our goal is to make it simple and rewarding for scientists to create openly accessible, interoperable and compute-enabled research objects, i.e. sharing aggregated research information in formats that can be easily downloaded, incorporated, analyzed, computed, and credited.

A Node is a version-able container that securely stores the components produced by a research project, and connects the components coherently. Nodes can contain a wide range of components - such as manuscripts, code, data, models, analysis pipelines, and more - to form an interconnected graph of different component types.

Check out this Node about exoplanet formation to get an idea of how your publication may look like as a Node.

Publishing components alongside manuscripts isn't just good practice in Open Science. Publishing related data increases the reach of scientific work, with indicators such as citations increasing by about 25%.

What does DeSci Nodes support?

We support open access and sharing of research and data.

We support FAIR data principles, and work with the Go-FAIR Foundation to support their integration into Nodes. We make it easy for researchers to ensure their data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

We support researchers in their careers - we take no copyrights on the content you post on Nodes. What you share on DeSci Nodes remains entirely the property of the original owners. As such, you are always free to submit and publish your work elsewhere.

Combining the two previous points makes DeSci Nodes a platform that the scientific community can benefit from - researchers sharing research objects show their dedication towards best practice and open science. You can verifiably display how FAIR your research, data, code etc. are - with the possibility of communities verifying this - doing much of the groundwork for journal publications.

We support the supporting roles. Research is not made by the first author. Usually there's a whole team contributing to a research project to make it come to life, some in roles that are recognized as authors, some that go unrecognized on the author list. On a Node, you can granularly trace and specify who did what, to ensure all contributors get the credit they deserve.

We support reviewers. Peer review today is mainly performed anonymously, and for free. DeSci Nodes introduces a new model of scientific discourse and dissemination that allows reviewers to accrue credit for their work, and eventually get rewarded for it.

We support the scientific community. We believe that a flourishing scientific ecosystem centers on communities. Communities generate positive externalities by creating and maintaining scientific knowledge (formally as in publications and journals, and informally as in shared notes or conversations). In DeSci Nodes, (soon) anyone can start a community to validate and/or curate scientific publications to contribute to a higher quality scientific record.

We support transparency. When using DeSci Nodes, either to publish or to review work, your contributions to the scientific record are granularly logged. You may always update and edit your work, for example by publishing a new version of your Node. But all previous actions are available for query, building towards a tamperproof scientific record.