Making history with Bitcoin Cash: The first ever scientific peer review article funded by crypto

One.Surgery, after a successful Flipstarter campaign in December 2020, launched the first ever peer review scientific journal in beta mode, with a new ground-breaking community funded model, powered by Bitcoin Cash.

The current scientific peer review publishing industry is fraught with multiple economic barriers to scientists: authors facing charges upto $3000 to simply publish one article, readers facing financial barriers to accessing scientific research (with costs upto $45 just to access an article), and the peer reviewers, the very core of the scientific community, and who often work on a voluntary basis, receive no compensation for their time from the profiteeting journal. The result? A multibillion dollar profiteering industry, taking advantage of the goodwill of the scientific community.

Despite growing angst against this suffocation of science, no solution has yet to fully solve the problem in a sustainable, scalable manner.

One.Surgery set out to change this with a journal model that promotes financial transparency, whilst offering affordable, ethical, and accessible access to science to everyone in the world, with no financial barriers.

The concept is very simple: authors do not pay a dime to publish with the journal whilst the journal covers all the costs, including offering stipend rewards to the peer reviewers. The journal then transparently publishes the cost to create the article, accounting every dollar.

The journal then simply asks the readership to cover the cost, in a crowdfunding model, where Bitcoin Cash micropayments (and Paypal macropayments) contribute to the article paywall, lowering it with each payment. Any contributor gets instant early access to the article, whilst helping to pay the overall price tag for the whole community. Once the article costs are covered, the article is open access for all.

Our model relies on Bitcoin Cash, with an incredible BCH workflow that runs throughout the entire scientific community. Our BCH economy works as follows:

1. The journal pays a Bitcoin Cash stipend ($10) to each peer reviewer reviewing the article.
2. The journal pays a Bitcoin Cash stipend ($2) to the corresponding author of the manuscript, allowing the authors to receive a stipend to access their own article online (as well as other articles in the journal)
3. The journal partners with global surgery charities willing to accept Bitcoin Cash donations, and the peer reviewers can choose to donate their $10 stipend directly to the charity instead.
4. The journal pays $10 Bitcoin Cash to the editor
5.The journal pays $15 Bitcoin to the type-setter (with a largely automated type-setting software)
6. The readers can pay for early access to the article for as little as $0.10 Bitcoin Cash

One.Surgery therefore set out to massively reduce the current industry cost for publishing a peer review article with a truly innovative manuscript management portal, and managed to reduce the cost of publication to $76 per article, with transparent cost analysis here.

In August, the journal launched in beta mode, and on the 15th August 2021, released its first peer review article, with a $76 paywall. Within a few hours, history was made, with the entire paywall chased down. Here is a recap of how Bitcoin Cash flowed through the entire global community, with just a single article.

Not only did we create open access scientific research for the world, we sent Bitcoin Cash all over the globe, including to charity, whilst introducing many new parties to the tech! Here is where BCH flowed in the creation of just one article:

1. $10 BCH sent to India (new Bitcoin Cash user)
2. $10 BCH sent to Mexico (new Bitcoin Cash user) - spent stipend on the article payment (ultimately donating the BCH back to the journal)
3. $10 BCH sent to UK (new Bitcoin Cash user), with donation forwarded to surgical charity in Cambodia (new Bitcoin Cash users)
4. $10 BCH sent to editor (established Bitcoin Cash user) - donated back to journal
5. $15 BCH sent to typesetter - donated back to journal
6. $2 BCH available to author (new Bitcoin Cash - unclaimed)

And the amazing aspect: 14 readers all contributed in Bitcoin Cash payments to pay off the scientific work for the whole world to access - and our payment system worked flawlessly with prompt.cash technology throughout the process.

And the full payment history can be transparently seen here for the first ever crowd-funded peer review scientitic article in history!

You can also check out our live journal stats dashboard here! We wonder how the following stat will play out over the course of our history?

What's next?

We have successfully demonstrated the incredible disruptive power of our paradiigm changing journal model, and the immense borderless, instant, global peer to peer technology of Bitcoin Cash.

However, building and establishing a journal's reputation requires dedication and on going community engagement. We will now aim to attract more authors, reviewers and readers across the world to this amazing model, whilst steadily building more and more features to our journal, to make it a truly world class journal in the industry.

Its an amazing beginning, and we know we will need the ongoing support of the Bitcoin Cash community as One.Surgery (and its innovative use-cases of BCH continues to grow). Read our Bitcoin Cash whitepaper here.

As a registered non-profit organisation in the UK, we do also accept BCH donations for our BCH projects. Our public wallet address and transparent BCH ledger here:

bitcoincash:qpag4glzn6jnc58rdlayyellkhnkqhm7l5vamtcft7