About Cabdell

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.

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. Until October 2026 the project was called ARIADNE; that name stays for now in a few technical places (the contract on TestNet), and the old address, ariadne.press, leads here.

This page has two parts. In short is for everyone. In detail explains exactly how it works, down to the arithmetic of reputation.

In short

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.
Read everything, without an account and without paying, except what this site is lawfully required to stop showing (each case is counted in its transparency report).
Search the full text of every article, review and comment, and find people, with filters for field, type, status, dates, authors, reviewers, reviews and votes, DOI, ORCID, language and licence. A search is a link you can share.
Review an article with a recommendation (accept, minor revision, major revision, reject) and a written report.
Earn the Peer-reviewed seal. Anyone can publish; the 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, and every author has a verified ORCID iD. A review counts when its author has a verified ORCID iD (one review per iD), knows the field (reputation 10 in it, given by at least 3 people other than the authors, each with a verified ORCID iD or expertise of their own, and earned at least 90 days before the review, or 3 works in its area on OpenAlex), has no conflict of interest with the authors, and writes at least 200 words. Search can show only sealed articles.
Comment and reply, mention people with @name.algo or @ADDRESS, and vote for the articles, reviews and comments you find valuable.
Flag an article you believe is plagiarised, fabricated or spam, once you have held some reputation in its field for a month. A flag deposits a bond, which comes back to you if the article is retracted: a false accusation costs something.
Follow researchers: their publications, reviews and comments appear in your inbox, on every device, because the follow is recorded on the blockchain.
Link your ORCID iD to your address: readers then see your name, citations use it, and co-authors can find you by your iD. It never changes your reputation, which is earned here.
Get a DOI for an article through Zenodo (run by CERN): Cabdell prepares a draft in your Zenodo account, you publish it there and declare its DOI here. The record is a third preserved copy and is indexed by scholarly search engines.
Get notified in your browser, even when it is closed, of replies, mentions, reviews and comments on your articles, co-author invitations and new followers: turn it on in the inbox, choose what to receive.
Keep lists of articles: private ones stay in your browser and nobody else sees them; public ones are recorded on the blockchain, appear on your profile and follow you to every device. “Save” on an article or on a search result puts it in a list, and “Bibliography” turns any list into a sorted reference list in any of the citation formats below.
Found or edit an overlay journal: a public list with an editorial policy and a board of editors who select articles already published here. Selected articles show the journal's name and their authors are told; the journal selects, it never decides what may be published.
Cite any article in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, BibTeX or RIS, naming the exact version you read, its DOI when it has one, and the authors' names from their verified ORCID records.

Why it exists

Open access. Nobody pays Cabdell to read or to publish. Each person pays only the small network fees and storage deposits of their own actions (see costs below); the platform takes nothing and pays for nobody.
Nothing is deleted from the record. Every version and every action stays on the blockchain, readable by anyone, except what this site is lawfully required to stop showing (the record itself never changes). A retraction is a visible status, not an erasure.
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. This website is one window onto it; anyone can build another one from the same data, and nobody, including the people who run Cabdell, can alter the past.

What Cabdell sets out to protect, and what it gives up when those principles conflict, is written down in Principles and commitments.

How Cabdell is funded

Cabdell runs on donations. It charges no fees of its own and has no tradable token or coin, no advertising and no investors. The storage deposits you pay when you act are non-refundable: they are locked in the contract for as long as the record exists, which is for ever, and nobody receives them, the project included (a flag's storage deposit alone comes back, when the flag is settled). The part of a flag's bond that is not returned or paid to an author stays in the contract for good, and so does anything paid to the contract above what it asks: nobody can withdraw them either. Donations pay for the server that runs the indexer, this 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.

What the blockchain does here, in plain words

A public notary. The blockchain (Algorand) is a shared record that thousands of computers keep identical. Once an action is written there, it has a date, an author and an order that nobody can change afterwards.
Your wallet is your signature. You do not create an account with a password. 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.
Texts live on IPFS, their fingerprints on the blockchain. The article itself is stored on IPFS, a network where a file is found by its fingerprint (its CID) instead of its location. The blockchain keeps that fingerprint, so any change to the text would be detected immediately.
Costs are small and visible. Each action pays a network fee of about 0.001 ALGO and, when it creates a record, a non-refundable storage deposit (about 0.22 ALGO to publish an article). Storage deposits are not paid to anyone: they stay locked in the contract for as long as the record exists, which is for ever (a flag's comes back once the flag is settled). The website always shows the exact total before your wallet asks you to sign, and pays exactly that: anything paid above it would stay in the contract.

TestNet and MainNet

Cabdell currently runs on TestNet, Algorand's public test network, where ALGO have no value and are given away (TestNet dispenser; it asks you to sign in with Google). Everything works exactly as it will on MainNet, but articles and reputation on TestNet are for testing and carry no value on MainNet. MainNet opens after an independent audit of the contract; the two networks never mix.

TestNet restarted on 8 October 2026 with contract v4, the candidate for MainNet: flags deposit a bond, repeated votes for the same person count less, and governance changes hands in two steps (see In detail). What was recorded on the previous TestNet application (772983107) stays on the blockchain and its content stays pinned on Cabdell's IPFS node, but it is no longer indexed or listed here; you can publish the same content again.

TestNet restarted before, on 1 October 2026, with the contract that added ORCID iDs, DOIs and follows; the application before that one (772965337) is kept the same way.

In detail

What is on the blockchain, and what is not

The Cabdell contract on Algorand stores, for every article: its number, its author (the publishing address), its primary and secondary fields, its type, the article it amends (if any), its status, its version number, the fingerprints of its current and previous versions, its dates, the total weight of the votes it received and how many, its declared co-authors and who confirmed, its reviews, comments, votes and flags. The text and its figures are on IPFS; the blockchain holds their 36-byte fingerprint (a CIDv1 with sha2-256).

The contract cannot be modified or deleted: it has no update path, and the account that deployed it has no privileges left. Everything this website shows (the feed, profiles, the inbox) is computed from the blockchain by the Cabdell indexer, and anyone can recompute it.

Each publication also creates an article token: a non-transferable token (Algorand standard ARC-71) that proves authorship in any wallet. Claiming it into your wallet is optional; once claimed it is frozen there, and nobody, not even you, can move it. Its metadata always points to the article's current version (ARC-19).

The life of an article

Status	Meaning	How it gets there
preprint	first public version	publishing
under review	the author invites reviews	the author
closed version	the author closed it: no more versions (it says nothing about review; the seal does)	the author, from under review
disputed	enough flags were raised; a jury examines it	automatically, by flags
retracted	withdrawn; still readable, permanently marked	the author, at any time (a disputed article too), or governance after a dispute

New versions are possible while the article is a preprint or under review; each one changes the fingerprint and keeps the previous ones on record. An amendment is a separate publication that points to the article it corrects; only an author of that article (its submitter or a co-author who confirmed) can publish one. A dispute is a label and a case for a jury, not a freeze: everything goes on while an article is disputed, except new versions, so that the jury judges what was flagged.

You can...	preprint	under review	closed version	disputed	retracted
publish a new version	yes	yes	no	no	no
review it	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
vote for it, or for its reviews and comments	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
claim reputation from it, confirm co-authorship	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
comment on it	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
flag it	yes	yes	yes	yes	no

Co-authors

The co-authors are declared when the article is published (up to 25 addresses) and the list can never change: nobody can be added or removed later. Each co-author confirms by signing from their own wallet. A declared co-author who votes for the article or reviews it can no longer confirm; a confirmed author can never vote for, review or flag their own article. Only the submitting author declares the article's DOI.

Vote weight

Every vote and every flag is weighted by the reputation of the person in the primary field of the article at that moment:

w = 1 + \left\lfloor \sqrt{\text{reputation}} \right\rfloor

Reputation in the field	0	1	4	9	25	100	400	2 500	10 000
Weight of a vote	1	2	3	4	6	11	21	51	101

The square root keeps influence growing slowly: a newcomer counts, and an expert counts more, but never overwhelmingly. Each person votes once per article, review or comment, and a vote can never be changed or withdrawn. A flag weighs the same, but at most 10.

Repeated votes for the same person count less. The contract counts how many times you have given something to each person (votes for their articles, reviews and comments, and resolutions of their comments). Your $n$ -th vote for the same person counts $\lfloor w / n \rfloor$ : the first fully, the second half, the third a third. A vote for an article counts for all its authors at once, divided by the most times you have voted for any of them. With weight 1, a second vote for the same person counts nothing. The website says so before you sign, and the first vote for a person pays a small deposit (0.0189 ALGO) for that count.

How reputation is earned

Reputation is a whole number per address and per field. It never decreases, and nobody ever gains reputation from their own action.

When someone else...	who gains	in which field	how much
votes for an article	each confirmed author, when they claim it	the article's primary field, and half of that in its secondary field	a share of the article's total vote weight (below)
marks a review as useful	the reviewer, immediately	the article's primary field	3 × the voter's weight (nothing if the voter is an author of the article)
votes for a comment	the commenter, immediately	the article's primary field	the voter's weight ÷ 5, rounded down
the author resolves a comment	the commenter, immediately	the article's primary field	5 ÷ the times this author has resolved this commenter's comments, rounded down (5, 2, 1, 1, 1, then 0), and nothing when the author has less than 10 reputation in the field

The weights in this table are after the division by repeated votes above. A vote for a comment from someone whose weight is below 5 (reputation below 16) is recorded but grants nothing. A comment is marked resolved even when the resolution grants nothing, and the website says which before the author signs.

Daily limit. An address can gain at most 50 reputation per field per day (a UTC day), from all sources together. For reviews and comments, whatever exceeds the day's limit is lost. For articles nothing is lost: what cannot be claimed today stays claimable on later days.

Article reputation, exactly. Votes for an article do not move anyone's reputation when they are cast; they add up in the article as its total weight $T$ (each vote with the weight it counted). The article has $N = 1 + \text{declared co-authors}$ equal shares, fixed when it was published. Then:

a confirmed co-author is entitled to $\lfloor T / N \rfloor$ ;
the publishing author is entitled to $\lceil T / N \rceil$ (the remainder of the division goes to them);
each author claims with their own transaction: the claim adds to their primary-field reputation what they are entitled to and have not claimed yet, up to what the daily limit still allows, and adds half of that amount (rounded down) to the secondary field, if the article has one and within that field's own daily limit;
a claim is refused when there is nothing new to claim, or when the day's limit in the primary field is already used up;
the share of a declared co-author who never confirms is never claimed by anyone;
reputation not claimed before an article is retracted is lost.

Worked example. An article with two declared co-authors ( $N = 3$ ) receives votes of weight 1, 2, 3 and 5: $T = 11$ . Each confirmed co-author is entitled to $\lfloor 11/3 \rfloor = 3$ , the publishing author to $\lceil 11/3 \rceil = 4$ . When the publishing author claims, their reputation in the primary field grows by 4 and in the secondary field by 2. If the article later receives a vote of weight 4 ( $T = 15$ ), each author can claim one more share: 5 in total each, so 2 more for the co-authors and 1 more for the publishing author.

Flags and disputes

To flag an article you need at least 10 reputation in its primary field, in a reputation record at least 30 days old (so that nobody can earn reputation and flag at once). A flag weighs like a vote, $1 + \lfloor \sqrt{\text{reputation}} \rfloor$ , but at most 10. When the flags of the current round add up to 30, the article becomes disputed: it takes at least three people. A round that has not opened a dispute 30 days after its first flag lapses, and the next flag starts a new round from zero.

Every flag deposits a bond of 1 ALGO, besides its storage deposit of 0.0297 ALGO. On an article that governance cleared in the past year the bond doubles for each such clearance: 2, 4, 8, at most 16 ALGO. What becomes of the bond depends on how the round ends:

How the round ended	The bond	The storage deposit
the article was retracted (by governance or by its submitter)	back to the flagger	back to the flagger
the round lapsed: no dispute within 30 days of its first flag	back to the flagger	back to the flagger
governance cleared the article	half to the article's submitter, half stays in the protocol for good	back to the flagger
nobody decided within 60 days: the dispute expired	stays in the protocol for good	back to the flagger

Once a round is over, anyone may settle its flags: the contract sends each bond where the table says, and the website offers "Reclaim your bond" to the flagger and the half of the bond to the submitter.

A disputed article goes on as before (votes, reviews, comments and claims continue) except that it takes no new version. A jury of seven people qualified in the field 90 days before the dispute began, one ticket per ORCID iD, drawn at random in a way anyone can check, decides by two thirds of at least five answers; the answers stay hidden on this site until the jury closes. Without a decision a second jury is drawn, and if that fails too, governance decides alone. Governance carries out the verdict and publishes its reasons, whose fingerprint is recorded with the decision: cleared returns the article to the status it had, at any time; retracted retracts it, but only 14 days after the dispute began. The submitter may also retract a disputed article. If nobody resolves the dispute within 60 days, anyone may end it: the article returns to the status it had, and the bonds stay in the protocol. Each address flags once per round, and flags are permanent.

Governance

Governance is a single address with two powers only: registering new fields (the OECD list of 42 fields is already registered) and resolving disputes, within the rules above (retraction only after 14 days, with published reasons); besides, it can hand its role to a new address, in two steps: it proposes the address, and the new address accepts by signing, so that a mistyped address can never take over. It cannot edit, hide or delete anything, and it cannot change the rules. It is a post-quantum account (Falcon-1024 signatures, available on Algorand since version 5.0), so that it stays secure even against future quantum computers; it will move to a post-quantum multi-signature account when Algorand offers one.

What each action costs

Action	Storage deposit (ALGO)
Publish	0.2222, plus 0.0293 per declared co-author
Confirm co-authorship	0
Follow, link an ORCID iD, declare a DOI	0
Vote for an article	0.0289, plus 0.0189 for each of its authors you have never given anything to before
Vote for a review or a comment	0.0321, plus 0.0189 if you have never given anything to its author before
Resolve a comment	0; 0.0189 when your resolution grants reputation to that commenter for the first time
Review	0.0927 the first time in a field, then 0.0658
Comment	0.0834 the first time in a field, then 0.0565
Claim reputation	0.0269 per field the first time, then 0
Flag	0.0297, plus the bond (1 ALGO; more after a clearance, see above); 0.0073 more for the flag that opens a dispute
Settle a flag, end an expired dispute	0
Claim the article token	0.1 kept in your own account while you hold the token

On top, each transaction pays the network fee (currently 0.001 ALGO per transaction; a publication is at least three, and more when it declares many co-authors; a vote for an article with more than two authors adds one per four more authors; settling a flag pays for the payments it makes). The website reads the exact amounts from the network and shows them before you sign.

What runs outside the blockchain

The indexer reads every Cabdell transaction and builds the feed, the profiles and the inbox. It also downloads each article from IPFS, checks that it is complete and that its header matches what was declared on the blockchain (a mismatch is shown as a warning, never hidden), and keeps a second copy so that articles stay available. The search runs on the indexer too: it reads the text of articles, reviews and comments from IPFS, keeps a text only when it matches its fingerprint on the blockchain, and can rebuild its search indexes at any time.
Citations between Cabdell articles. An article that links to another one, writes its DOI or the CID of one of its versions, or amends it, cites it: each article shows how often it is cited, with the list of citing articles, and each profile shows the citations its articles received. Retracted articles are not counted. When an article is retracted, the articles that cite it show a warning and their authors are notified.
Thread Score, Cabdell's citation measure (0 to 100, 50 is typical). Each article is placed among the Cabdell articles of its field, two at a time and at the same age, by the citations each received from other people (self-citations and retracted articles left out): its percentile. An old article keeps climbing while it is cited, a strong year weighs little, and a recent article is not judged against years it has not lived. A person's Thread Score is the mean percentile of their articles, each weighted by their share of it, with one typical article added so that a single lucky article does not make 100. So it compares fairly across fields, careers of any length and teams of any size, and anyone can compute it again from the chain and the articles. A citation counts toward it only when the citing article has a review that counts or a vote from someone who was an expert in its field (as the seal judges it), and once per citing author, cited article and year.
The Peer-reviewed seal. The indexer judges every review against the seal's rules and shows, on the article page, which reviews count and why the others do not: written by an author; no verified ORCID iD; a second review under the same ORCID iD; no expertise (neither reputation 10 in the article's primary or secondary field, given by at least 3 people other than the authors, each with a verified ORCID iD or expertise of their own and not merely returning reputation the reviewer gave them, and earned 90 days before the review, nor 3 works in its area on OpenAlex); a conflict of interest (the same ORCID iD, a Cabdell article written together or works together on OpenAlex within 3 years of the review, the same institution on the ORCID records, or an author who voted for, found useful or resolved something of the reviewer's in the 3 years before the review); its text not read from IPFS yet; shorter than 200 words; or a favourable review returned within 2 years of one received from an author. The seal is alive: later reviews can take it away, it is suspended while the article is disputed and gone if it is retracted, and it names the version the reviews were written on. Anyone can compute it again; each result names its rule version.
Citation counts. For a verified ORCID iD, the profile also shows the citations of all the person's works as OpenAlex (an open index of scholarly works) counts them, rechecked weekly with the ORCID record.
The website is this interface. Your wallet signs; the website only prepares transactions and shows their cost.
Algorand nodes. On TestNet and MainNet, the indexer and the website read the blockchain, and your wallet's transactions reach it, through the free public Algorand API of Nodely. The indexer asks it sparingly: every 20 seconds, for Cabdell's own transactions only.
ORCID and DOI checks. Linking an ORCID iD or declaring a DOI is recorded on the blockchain; whether it is true is checked outside it. The indexer reads the public ORCID record (it must list your Cabdell profile among its websites) and the Zenodo or DataCite record of a DOI (it must say it is identical to the article and to that version's content), then rechecks every week. Readers see an ORCID iD only once it is verified, and a DOI once it is verified or, when its registry cannot be checked, as declared by an author; a DOI whose record does not point back is not shown.
Zenodo drafts. When you ask for a DOI, Cabdell's server prepares the draft in your Zenodo account with the permission you give on Zenodo (creating drafts, never publishing). The permission lasts at most an hour and is kept only in a sealed cookie in your browser.
Names. Where an address has a name ending in .algo, the website shows it. These names come from NFD (Non-Fungible Domains), a naming service on Algorand: the owner of an address chooses the name and proves the address is theirs. The name is a convenience, not a certificate of identity, and the full address is always one click away. The picture next to a name is the NFD avatar its owner chose, or a pattern generated from the address. Cabdell's server asks NFD for the names, so your browser never contacts NFD. A mention written as @name.algo notifies the address verified for that name when the comment is sent, and that address is what the blockchain records.

The indexer and the website can be rebuilt by anyone from the blockchain alone, which is the ultimate record; the ORCID, DOI and OpenAlex checks are asked again from those services.

Known limits

One person can create several addresses. Groups of fresh addresses that vote for each other gain reputation slowly (weight 1 each, the square root, the daily limit and the division of repeated votes between the same two addresses damp it) but they are not prevented. The seal and the juries count only people with a verified ORCID iD or expertise of their own; detection of coordinated voting is planned before MainNet.
Reputation does not decay over time.
Governance is one signer until post-quantum multi-signature accounts exist.
Follows, ORCID links and DOI declarations are public and permanent. Anyone can see who follows whom and which iD an address declared. Unfollowing or unlinking marks them inactive; the history stays on the blockchain.
A Zenodo record cannot be deleted once published, even if the article is later retracted here; its description can still be edited on Zenodo.

To publish, read the publishing guide in the documentation.