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Introduction

Chive is a decentralized eprint service built on the AT Protocol. It provides researchers with a platform to share scholarly work while maintaining data sovereignty.

What is Chive?​

Chive functions as an AppView in the AT Protocol ecosystem. It indexes eprints from user-controlled Personal Data Servers (PDSes) and presents them through a unified interface. Users retain full ownership of their content; if Chive were to disappear, all eprints would remain safely stored in their respective PDSes.

Key features​

Decentralized publishing​

Eprints are stored in user PDSes, not on Chive servers. Researchers always control their work and can migrate to other platforms at will.

Community review​

Open peer review with inline comments and endorsements. Reviews are public and linked to reviewer identities via AT Protocol DIDs.

Knowledge graph​

A Wikipedia-style moderation system allows the community to propose and vote on field classifications. Authority records keep metadata consistent across the platform.

PMEST classification (Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, Time) plus FAST facets enable precise discovery of related work.

Rich text and LaTeX​

Abstracts and titles support structured rich text with LaTeX math expressions, entity references, code blocks, and cross-references to other eprints and knowledge graph nodes.

Hierarchical affiliations​

Authors can represent institutional affiliations as trees (university > school > department > lab), linked to ROR identifiers and knowledge graph nodes.

Schema versioning​

Record-type lexicons track schema revisions. The AppView applies migrations at index time, so legacy PDS records continue to work without modification.

Plugin ecosystem​

Integrate with external services: ORCID for author identification, DOI for persistent identifiers, Zenodo for archiving, and more.

Who is Chive for?​

Chive serves researchers across disciplines who want to share eprints while retaining ownership of their work. It is suited for:

  • Researchers who value data sovereignty and portability
  • Communities that want transparent peer review processes
  • Projects that require integration with multiple scholarly services
  • Organizations that need compliance with open access mandates

Next steps​