Detract

Once a paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal and later found to be invalid, the retraction process can be lengthy and controversial. Detract revolutionizes the retraction process by allowing anyone in the scientific community to 'Challenge' a published paper, triggering a community investigation that will lead to the retraction of the faulty paper in a transparent and efficient way through a blind voting process within a limited time period and then the results are revealed afterwards. Basically, when a user "challenges a paper" it means that they are claiming that this published paper has invalid results and thus needs investigation from researchers that can investigate on the issue and vote whether the user claim is correct or wrong.

Detract is a permissionless web application that allows users to connect their wallets and 'Challenge' a published paper and provide evidence supporting its retraction. Upon challenge, the paper DOI and the evidence will be stored in a decentralized repository. To prevent spamming, the 'Challenger' must stake a small amount of money, which will be returned in case the investigation turns positive. Voters then have the opportunity to view the evidence and vote whether they agree with the Challenger. The votation will be held for a limited time, with a supermajority (67%) necessary for retraction. If the network agrees with the challenger, the paper will be retracted and the stake will be returned to the challenger. Otherwise, the stake will be able to be claimed by the author of the challenged paper.

React.js is used to build the user interface (website) where the users (researchers) can:

1. Log in with Wallet Connect/Metamask
2. Challenge a published paper
3. Vote on a challenged paper

Firestore is used to store a number of published papers info (i.e: paper author, title, DOI) and the user's challenges

Flow:

• The user gets a search bar to fetch a paper using its unique DOI
• The user stakes some ETH into our contract while creating a Challenge
• The user challenges the paper (providing evidence)
• The evidence file is uploaded to IPFS, the hash is stored on the contract and is retrievable through The Graph
• The scientists can investigate the issue and vote for the challenge
• The Voters can either upvote(agreeing to the challenge created for retraction) or downvote(against the retraction being created)
• Once voted, voters cannot double vote on the same challenge
• Voting will continue for a certain period of time, all interested voters have to vote during that time
• Once the Voting period ends, either the challenger or the author can claim the stake based on the number of votes.