Why we're here
We are scientists and engineers building tools to make knowledge more accessible and verifiable.
We envision a scientific record without data silos, content drift, paywalls, and proprietary analytics.
We build technologies for open and reproducible science. We strive to bring simplicity, radical accessibility, and higher efficiency to scientific publishing and funding.
We build technology that transforms how we store, access, assess, and track scientific outputs. We aim to build a world where vendor lock-in, paywalls, proprietary analytics, and link rot are a thing of the past.
Instead of fragmented data silos stored by centralized cloud providers, we believe in a future where research lives in an open, content-addressed dataverse, secured by an open, verifiable index that is accessible to all humans and machines.
What we build
Open state repository
Data layer
Our goal is to build a credibly neutral and content-addressed library for interoperable research outputs that requires minimal maintenance or dependencies on intermediaries.
Designed as a layered, extensible, and radically open architecture to preserve, access, and verify new knowledge.
Accessible through Gateways
Application layer
Gateways are applications that interact with the open state repository. Our goal is to make it easy for others to build and deploy their own gateway.
Gateways can take many forms: preprint platforms, digital libraries, journal publication platforms, general or thematic repositories, research information systems, and more.
Peer-review by learned societies
Validation layer
Quality validation of research outputs is vital for a trustworthy knowledge infrastructure. We build social coordination tools to enable different approaches to peer-review.
New funding models
Funding layer
Our tools, when combined with impact certificates, retroactive funding, market mechanisms, and other innovative funding structures, make it possible to bring more money, experimentation, and efficiency to how research is financed.
We contribute to the development of pilot projects and tools with the goal to offer new approaches to research funding in the future.
Partners and areas of focus
Storage and computation
Research generates immense volumes of valuable data. We create interfaces with new systems to preserve, publish, and operate on scientific data.
We create solutions to interface with decentralized storage and compute networks to support data upload, storage, access control, retrieval, and computation over data.
Next-gen persistent identifiers
The current persistent identifier of the scientific record - the DOI system - suffers from content drift, resolves inconsistently and requires costly maintenance.
DeSci Labs is developing decentralized persistent identifiers for linked digital objects (dPIDs). dPIDs are permissionless, decentralized, and and can granularly address the entire linked data structure of any research object while maintaining versioning capabilities of the underlying content.
Web of FAIR digital objects
The FAIR principles are best practices aimed at improving findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuseability of stored objects for both humans and machines.
Our infrastructure aims to transform research publications and their linked artefacts into FAIR digital objects (FDO). This open state repository architecture is FAIR-by-design. It addresses core limitations of traditional architecture and can index large volumes of uniquely identified, machine actionable research objects.
Plural metrics and verifiable attestations
Several scientific organization have created badges to attest to the attributes of published research.
Badges track the attributes of published research such as the openness of the data and code, the re-usability of these artefacts and the reproducibility of scientific research. Efficient verification of such badges is an unsolved problem. We are building interfaces and workflows to reduce the cognitive overload involved in verifying badges of published research.
Technologies for digital societies
We need tools to facilitate bottom-up coordination of robust research communities.
DeSci Labs is building curation layers for scientific communities to recapture the value of activities such as peer-review, editorial work and attribute (badge) verification.
