Arweave Academia

Introduction

I have had experience working as a developer for a project called Erudite Scholars ( https://eruditescholars.net ), the project deals with uploading academic journals and storing them online. In that project, the papers are stored in Amazon S3, which we pay for yearly. Not paying for your storage needs on Amazon will make Amazon delete your document. Arweave makes it easy to store data for a live time by paying once. During the course of this hackathon, I and my teammates have learnt how to work with the Arweave ecosystem. We built our project by leveraging the power of AI to distinguish documents that are not academic. When we have an academic document, it is uploaded to Arweave where it will remain forever. The beauty of Arweave is that you only pay once.

Building the Project

We initially wanted to build a system when users can upload the documents themselves but we ran into issues trying to use the ArweaveKit, so we jettisoned that decided to do a server side upload. We learnt how to work with Bundlr, which makes uploading data to Arweave super easy. The team built a NextJS project and we all learnt together as a team.

Post MVP

My team looked at the Arweave Naming System which will be suitable for pointing at documents stored at Arweave and giving it a friendly name. Currently in academia if you want your papers to be always available, a journal has to pay for a Digital Object Identifier ( DOI ). The DOI is a pointer to the server in which your academic document is stored. Arweave reduces the cost you have to pay to host your papers in perpetuity.

Building and incorporating ANS into Arweave Academia ( our project ) will give us access to a variety of users who are currently paying a yearly amount for a DOI license. ANS friendly URL will be a good thing for sharing academic content, as authors can easily remember where the storage location of their work and also that the work is stored forever.