ScienceFair: An Innovative Decentralized Open source Tool for Researchers
What is ScienceFair?
ScienceFair is an open-source multi-platform desktop application for researching. It aims to provide them a powerful free tool to increase their productivity. It helps them to discover, collect, organize, read and analyze scientific papers freely.
ScienceFair is a production of Code of Science & FathomLabs with support of many other contributors and Mozilla Science Lab, the Dat project and eLife.
In short ScienceFair is:
- A decentralized system that helps distribution of research storage
- Open-source & Free
- Allowing end-user to customize the experience
- Supporting Open Data
- Unique ecosystem for open science
Features
Innovative user interface
With a simple yet powerful user interface, ScienceFair is easy to use and does not require much time and effort to learn.
Time-Efficient Reader
ScienceFair uses eLife Lens open source reader which provides an innovative reading user interface. Lens reader improves the reading experience with navigation and browsing embedded tools. It helps researchers to easily interpret scientific papers.
Powerful Search
ScienceFair comes with powerful search functions to search for local and/ or remote collections and data sources, it merges the results as it keeps searching in the background.
Built-in bibliometrics and analytics
Data mining tools are a requirement for researchers, Therefore ScienceFair is shipped with real-time data mining features allowing live dashboard updates to analyze the results and optimize the search and papers discovery process.
The power of Dat; Decentralized web
ScienceFair uses Dat protocol; a decentralized peer-to-peer protocol for distributed data synchronization. It works online as it syncs the data while online, and it has developer-friendly tools and documentations. Dat protocol can help to build decentralized websites, application and tools. For ScienceFair, Dat protocol provides an ecosystem for distributing, sharing and searching science papers for researchers. It's a big step for open science.
Technology used
ScienceFair is built with NodeJS and Electron. That's why it works smoothly on multiple platforms.
Platforms
- Windows for 32bit & 64bit
- Linux: .deb package for Debian/Ubuntu based distributions
- Linux: .rpm package for Fedora/SUSE
- macOS (10.9 and later)
