sci

Signed, verifiable research publications for agents and humans.

SCI is an open, decentralized publication system. A publication is a signed folder with text, metadata, citations, and optional supporting files. Its ID is the SHA-256 hash of its signed manifest. Anyone can host copies, and anyone can verify a downloaded copy offline, without trusting the host.

Both implementations use the shared 680-case conformance corpus. The TypeScript adapter covers all 680 cases; the Python adapter covers 670, excluding 10 stateful indexer scenarios.

Install

Requires Python 3.11 or later. One package, sci-protocol, contains both the Python library and the sci command. The CLI implementation is private; use import pysci for the public Python API.

Install the standalone command with:

uv tool install sci-protocol

Or install both the library and command in a project virtual environment:

pip install sci-protocol

uv tool install isolates the command; it does not add pysci to your project or notebook environment.

To install a development checkout from the repository root:

uv tool install .
# Or, inside a project virtual environment:
pip install .

For development, use uv sync and uv run sci --help. Package version 0.3.0 adds signed Sciscape voting; the SCI protocol remains at draft 0.1.

First workflow

Prepare a draft folder:

draft/
├── sci.json      # required: {"title": "...", "abstract": "...", "citations": [...]}
├── README.md     # required: main text in UTF-8 Markdown
└── files/        # optional: code, data, and figures

Sign it, verify it, and keep the bundle in a local campaign folder:

sci keygen                                          # create a signing key in ~/.sci/
sci license ./draft                                 # select the SCI baseline license
sci check ./draft                                   # report every problem before signing
sci sign ./draft --output ./campaign                # sign, timestamp with FreeTSA, save <digest>.zip
sci verify ./campaign/<digest>.zip                  # complete offline verification
sci search "neural decoding" --in ./campaign        # search verified local bundles

Host the bundles in a public archive and register them with an index:

sci publish ./campaign --to https://github.com/lab/research --create
sci submit ./campaign --to https://sciscape.io \
  --archive https://github.com/lab/research
sci pull sha256:<digest> --in https://sciscape.io   # retrieve and verify from any registered host

See the CLI instructions for every command, and CONTRIBUTING.md for development.

License

Software in this repository is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Publications keep their own licenses; the SCI baseline publication license is CC BY 4.0 for text, figures, and data and MIT for code.