Andrew chatted with JRingo to brainstorm how to implement funding citation graphs (of academic articles) in Drips. ## High-Level Thoughts/Concerns > Paper authors might not be as aligned as FOSS devs are. how do we deal with permissioning control of funds flowing to the paper if any author can claim? It is probably best to start by saying that only the first author on a paper can claim ownership of the paper. They can then deicde how to distribute funds to the other authors > Technically, usually the authors of the paper themselves do not own the paper, from a copyright standpoint. It's typically some journal or academic institution. Based on this, we may need to verify that there's not some kind of Trademark-style legal issue with using the public identity of the paper as a proxy to send funds to the authors. Should probably talk with a lawyer at some point to verify that there is no issue here. > Technically, many academics also have a contract that says that they must give a perecnt of funds to their research org. This can probably just be handled by the each recipient themselves out-of-band of the Drips flow. ## Implementation Details ### Identity Driver / Verifying Authors In terms of creating a new identity driver, the OrcID system is probably the best trusted website to use as a trust/identity anchor for *authors*, combined with DOIDs as a trust/identity anchor for *papers*. These are the primary legacy paid systems that solve this problem for paper authors in the web2 world and have almost universal adoption. E.g: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8400-8901 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physrep.2021.10.004 Unfortunately, the oracle flow to verify ownership may be less straightforward than with a Github project. By default, DOIs serve as something like a redirecting URL, so the page that is pointed to for each DOI can be on a different host site. The OrcID pages have a standard format, but unfortunately in the list of authors they use the author's name as as string instead of including an OrcID as a reference. It's possible that there are some other versions of these pages, or APIs, or some kind of paid service that could be used by the oracle. The flow would be something like: 1. Funder streams to a paper based on its DOID (which could be looked up in the app in different ways) 2. Primary author comes to the app to claim. 3. Oracle scrapes some pages from the OrcID and DOID systems and verifies primary author. 4. Primary author sets up DripList to disperse funds to the authors and to the most critical cited papers that are cited by the paper. ### Same Webapp VS Separate App Jon thinks we should do all of it in the same Drips app... treat papers and FOSS repos the same and allow them both to be included in the same DripLists. Papers should even be able to split to repos and repos should be able to split to papers if they wish.