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What Cabdell is

Cabdell is an open system for publishing science. Every action (publishing an article, reviewing it, voting, commenting, raising a flag) is a public, signed and permanent record. No editor decides what is published: what rises is what researchers with reputation in the same field judge to be good, and that reputation is earned, field by field, from the judgement of others.

The record lives on Algorand, a public blockchain. The texts live on IPFS, a network where a file is found by a fingerprint of its content. The website at cabdell.press is one window onto that record; anyone can build another.

Three parts: the protocol, the indexer and the web app

Section titled “Three parts: the protocol, the indexer and the web app”

Cabdell is not one program but three, each with its own job. Only the first one is the record; the other two are built on top of it. Anyone could build their own from the published rules; the source of Cabdell’s own indexer and web app is not public yet.

  1. The protocol is the set of rules everyone shares, and the record they produce. At its heart is a smart contract on Algorand, a program that cannot be changed or switched off: it accepts an action (publish, review, vote, comment, flag, claim reputation) only if it follows the rules, and writes it down with its author, its date and its order, for good. The protocol also fixes how an article is packaged (a folder with index.md and assets/, stored on IPFS and named by its CID, the fingerprint the contract keeps) and a few conventions read from ordinary Algorand transactions, such as public lists, journals and the articles a reader follows. Nobody, Cabdell’s team included, can rewrite what the protocol recorded.
  2. The indexer reads that record, transaction by transaction, and turns it into something you can browse and search: the feed, profiles, the inbox, search, citations, the Thread Score and the Peer-reviewed seal. It fetches every article from IPFS, checks that it matches what was declared on the blockchain, keeps a copy, and checks ORCID iDs and DOIs against ORCID, Zenodo and DataCite. Everything it shows can be recomputed from the record by anyone who runs another indexer: it organises the record, it does not own it.
  3. The web app is what you see at cabdell.press. It shows what the indexer computed and reads the texts from IPFS; when you act, it prepares the transaction, shows its exact cost and hands it to your wallet, which signs it. It never holds your keys or your money, and another website could show the same record differently.

When you publish, for example, the web app packages your folder and has it pinned on IPFS, your wallet signs the publication, the protocol records it on Algorand, and the indexer picks it up a few seconds later so that it appears in the feed. How it works in five minutes follows each part in more detail.

What you can do

Section titled “What you can do”
  • Publish an article, short notes, an amendment to an earlier article, a dataset or a replication of someone else’s result. You choose its field (and optionally a second one) and you can name co-authors. See Publish an article.
  • Read everything, without an account and without paying.
  • Search the full text of every article, review and comment, and find people, with filters such as field, type, status, dates, DOI, ORCID, language and licence. A search is a link you can share. See Search.
  • Review an article with a recommendation (accept, minor revision, major revision, reject) and a written report. See Review an article.
  • Earn the Peer-reviewed seal for your article when qualified reviewers recommend it. See Get the Peer-reviewed seal.
  • Comment and reply, mention people with @name.algo or @ADDRESS, and vote for the articles, reviews and comments you find valuable. See Comment, mention and vote.
  • Flag an article you believe is plagiarised, fabricated or spam, once you have some reputation in its field. See Flag an article.
  • Follow researchers and get their publications, reviews and comments in your inbox, on every device, and turn on browser notifications; follow an article to hear of its new versions, reviews and comments. See Follow people and get notified.
  • Link your ORCID iD so that readers see your name and citations use it. It never changes your reputation. See Link your ORCID iD.
  • Get a DOI for an article through Zenodo (run by CERN). See Get a DOI with Zenodo.
  • Keep lists of articles, private or public, and turn any list into a bibliography. See Lists and bibliographies.
  • Cite any article in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, BibTeX or RIS, naming the exact version you read. See Cite an article.

Why it exists

Section titled “Why it exists”
  • Open access. Nobody pays to read or to publish. Each person pays only the small network costs of their own actions; the platform takes nothing and pays for nobody.
  • Nothing is deleted from the record. Every version and every action stays on the blockchain. A retraction is a visible status, not an erasure. Cabdell’s own site stops showing something only in the few cases the law requires (see Principles and commitments).
  • No gatekeeper. Anyone can take part from the first day. Quality emerges from votes weighted by reputation in the field, not from the opinion of one editor.
  • Reputation is earned, not granted. It is public, it belongs to people rather than to journals, and it is separate for each field: being respected in medicine gives no weight in history.
  • Made to last. Articles are plain text (Markdown with LaTeX formulas) plus their own files, identified by a fingerprint of their content. Anyone can keep a copy, and in thirty years it will still be readable.
  • Independent of this website. The record lives on a public blockchain. Anyone can build another window onto the same data, and nobody, including the people who run Cabdell, can alter the past.

What makes it different

Section titled “What makes it different”

Reviews and reputation in the open

Section titled “Reviews and reputation in the open”

Reviews are signed, public and permanent, like everything else. Each vote and each flag weighs according to the reputation its author has in the article’s main field, and reputation comes only from what other people think of your work: votes for your articles, reviews that others mark as useful, comments that others value. Nobody gains reputation from their own action, and it never decreases. The exact arithmetic is in Reputation and vote weight.

No paywall

Section titled “No paywall”

Reading needs nothing at all: no account, no wallet, no subscription. Publishing has no fee either. The only costs are Algorand’s network fee (about 0.001 ALGO per transaction) and a storage deposit for the records you create (about 0.22 ALGO to publish an article). Deposits are not paid to anyone: they stay locked in the protocol for as long as the record exists. See Costs and deposits.

The wallet is the identity

Section titled “The wallet is the identity”

There are no accounts and no passwords. A wallet app on your phone or computer holds a private key and signs each action; your public address is your identity. Cabdell never sees your key. You can add a readable name (an NFD name ending in .algo) and link your ORCID iD, but the address is what the record holds. See Wallets and your address.

The Peer-reviewed seal

Section titled “The Peer-reviewed seal”

Anyone can publish, and publishing is immediate. The Peer-reviewed seal tells reviewed work apart: an article holds it while at least two reviews that count recommend it (accept or minor revision), more than ask for major revision or rejection. A review counts when its author knows the field, has no conflict of interest with the authors, and writes at least 200 words. The seal is computed in the open, so anyone can check it. See The Peer-reviewed seal.

Where the name comes from

Section titled “Where the name comes from”

Cabdell is Valencian and Catalan for a ball of yarn. In Greek myth Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of thread to find his way out of the labyrinth. Cabdell keeps a thread through the scientific record that anyone can follow back: who published what, which version, who reviewed it, who supported it. Cabdell’s citation measure, the Thread Score, is named after that thread.

Until October 2026 the project was called ARIADNE (DECISIONS D-165). The old name stays for now in technical names that cannot change without a new contract: the application on TestNet, the per-article tokens (Ariadne Article, unit ARIA), and the settings of a server (ARIADNE_*). The old address, ariadne.press, leads to cabdell.press.

How Cabdell is funded

Section titled “How Cabdell is funded”

Cabdell runs on donations. It has no fees, no token for sale, no advertising and no investors, and the deposits you pay when you act are locked in the application as storage: nobody receives them, the project included. Donations pay for the server that runs the indexer, the website and a copy of every article, for the domain and storage, and for development and an independent security review before MainNet. If Cabdell is useful to you, you can support it.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”