With the growing number of brilliant minds forgoing academia in search for more lucrative and sustainable options, knowledge and curiosity is actively being cast aside in our society. We aim to strike a balance between money and research to reincentivize researching while making it a monetarily sustainable path for those pursuing academia. Our idea was inspired by the decentralization technique used by NFTs and other blockchain technologies. We use this project to provide a safe space for researchers to publish ground breaking research without forcing them into the preying hands of journals.

Our project, Indicium, is a one-stop shop web application for selling and buying research papers. Unlike a journal, authors can upload their own research papers to our website and will recieve sellable digital copies of their paper. These copies are sold almost like trading cards, as users want to read and sell their copies of the research paper. The digital tracking of the paper allows us to collect royalties for the original author every time it passes hands.

We built our webapp using a JavaScript + React frontend and a Python + Flask backend. Furthermore, we hosted our application as well as a database using Google Cloud Platform's BigQuery database and AppEngine.

When coming up with our idea, we realized that piracy exists in the imperfect world we are in today. Although we cannot solve piracy as a whole, we can certainly do what we can to provide authors a better solution for their papers than journals. As for technical challenges, we wanted to make sure that people could not directly download PDFs so reproduction could be limited. Therefore, we opted for a text approach of the scraped document that is harder to directly copy.

We are proud to have come up with a fully-functional, hosted web application that features a login and page trading system for Boilermake.

Arjun: Through working on this project, I learned how to create a React + Flask app using a REST API. Furthermore, I learned how to host our project and database on GCP, which was a fairly simple process (Thanks Google Cloud!). Lastly, I learned a little more about developing algorithms in Python, as well as hashing functions using hashlib for Python3. Jacob: Abhinav: I centered divs. Akash: I centered divs.

Although some advanced key features of our project are not completely polished, we believe that Indicium has a place in the future of research. We would like to expand on this idea for not only research papers but to other digital media that authors wish to protect. We also would like to provide authors the ability to host their content for free for certain groups of individuals, such as students or non-corporation entities.