Collaboration Tools and Peer Review Process

In a first proof of concept, deScier will fund this first issue entirely and test the workflow using the $desci pretoken economy.

The manuscript lifecycle could operate as follows:

1. Author submits a manuscript to deScier online

2. Secretary receives submission

3. Secretary checks for scientific manuscript format (title, author, affiliation, digital wallet address, abstract, introduction or rationale, hypothesis, material and methods, results, discussion, conclusions, reference)

4. If ok, secretary accepts manuscript submission

5. Secretary sends email to author communicating acceptance to review the manuscript, inform ways to proceed to payment and further information on how The DeSci Journal handles revision and publication

6. Author agrees to info and pays submission fees

7. A third-party can pay for the submission fees. Author will inform wallet address and the percentage of royalties to be written to this third-party

8. If needed secretary automatically translate manuscript to English and manually formats as a scientific manuscript in .doc or .docx file or .opendoc so that to facilitate track changes, comments and reviewing for the authors

9. Secretary sends the formatted English manuscript to editor

10. Editor receives the manuscript

11. Editor accepts the manuscript, uploads the manuscript in the cloud and sends the manuscript link to 2 (two) reviewers

12. Editors sends the manuscript link to the designer to make a ‘abstract image’ (a summary of the manuscript in image format)

13. The designer also checks figures and tables

14. Reviewers receive the manuscript link and have 20 days to review

15. Reviewers accept/ reject the manuscript

16. Reviewers accept/ reject the timeline to complete the review

17. Reviewers may choose to review anonymously

18. To speed up the revision process, the reviewing process is carried out online with comments’ notes of the file manuscript to facilitate the author to accept suggestions and recommendations. A checklist for reviewers will be built and shared (a document on best practices when peer-reviewing, such as not to require further experiments, be open to novelty, place authors in the first place, check for figures, tables and supplementary data, suggest a design for figures, tables and infographics)

19. Upon revision, authors and editors can see the reviewer’s comments in real time but should wait for the review to be complete to reply

20. Editor receives a complete-reviewed-manuscript message from the 2 reviewers

21. Editors reads and checks online for the suitability of suggestions from the 2 reviewers

22. Editors sends a message to the author to check and reply for the reviewers comments within a certain timeline (10 to 15 days)

23. Author accepts a timeline for accepting/ rejecting the review comments

24. Author accepts both reviews and edit the updated manuscript containing all revisions

25. Alternatively, author may not agree with suggested revisions, give arguments and start a new round of review

26. Editor receives the reviewed-by-author manuscript message with the acceptance or rejection of the reviews

27. Editor checks the author’s replies to the 2 reviewers

28. If all revisions accepted, editor joins the reviewed and accepted by the author manuscript to the image abstract and to the figures (from the images designer) and sends to the layout designer for the final composition before publication

29. Final manuscript as pdf format is sent to author for final check on manuscript text (for typos and any other errors), figures, tables and references

30. Author authorizes publication as SP-NFT

31. Author decides on open-access, whether will have partly hidden text, access to original raw data, access to IP protected data, access to potentially patent fileable data, amount of royalties retained in the smart contract by the author and co-authors, the amount to be transferred to the laboratory and the amount to be transferred to the organization (university, research institution, company) in case of a sellable SP-NFT

32. Author gives authorization for the SP-NFT to be displayed in The DeSci Journal repository

33. Editor receives authorization and send to the secretary

34. Secretary sends manuscript for publication

35. Manuscript is minted to a SP-NFT with the specifics chosen by the author

36. SP-NFT is transferred to the author wallet and live in The DeSci Journal if chosen so

37. A ‘new publication’ is communicated to the community to discuss how to use the asset and further use. This could result in:

38. 1. Filing for further IP and patents.

    2. Filing for clinical trials and further studies.

    3. Monetizing data through Marketplaces.