The problem publ.it solves

The problem:

Researchers are usually tied to a university and don't necesarilly have a platform to pursue independant research. Also, when researchers publish their papers in academic journals, they do not receive any payment for the publication itself. In fact, many academic journals actually charge researchers a fee to cover the cost of peer review, editing, and publishing.

Thats where we come in. Publ.it aims to be a platform for researchers to easily crowdfund, publish, and distribute their own work. The research can be minted into an NFT and stored on the Polygon network. This ensures that there can be no disputes regarding ownership, as well as there is clear proof of transaction in case the rights to the work get sold.

There is also scope for future development, especially regarding verification (peer reviews, upvote/downvote system) and funding (subscription models, all-or-nothing funding)). Going forward, we are hoping to see a paradigm shift in the role of a researcher, from a university worker into someone capable of realizing their vision by themselves.

Challenges we ran into

Regarding front end we were able to publish sample papers but we had trouble retrieving data from IPFS. Not only that, we had some issues figuring out how to decode the encrypted input data but we found a Node script that did what we needed.
Also while a few of us had worked with blockchain related projects before, this was the first time any of us had deployed a Testnet, it took us a while to figure out how exactly everything works. (ChatGPT helped a lot)