The mission of ResearchHub is to accelerate the pace of scientific research by creating a modern mobile and web application where people can collaborate on research in a more efficient way, similar to GitHub for software engineering. Within the platform, research papers are grouped into “Hubs” by area of research, with highly upvoted posts (including the paper, summary, and discussion) rising to the top of each Hub.

To incentivize contribution and bring the community together, ResearchHub has created the ERC20 token ResearchCoin (RSC). Users can earn and transfer RSC by sharing, curating, and discussing topics on the platform. Rewards are proportional to how valuable the community perceives the actions to be, as measured by upvotes.

RSC is also linked to a user's reputation on the platform, calculated as their lifetime RSC earnings minus downvote erosion. Reputation is tied to certain privileges and moderation mechanisms within the community. The token can be used to tip content creators and open bounties to incentivize completion of scientific tasks like peer review or generating graphical abstracts for papers.