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Locked paywalls and high fees are defining characteristics of traditional academic research. DeSci can lower the barriers to access.

Academia and science are both in the throes of a crisis, marked by several inefficiencies directly impacting our scientific prowess and research capabilities. The subject of stagnation within universities and academic institutions is taboo, and there is no place in this system for dissenting intellectuals who challenge the status quo or the quality of scientific research.

Decentralized science (DeSci) aims to disrupt these systems for good reason. DeSci paired with blockchain technology has the potential to upend existing funding schemes and enhance collaboration between stakeholders in scientific endeavors.

Access to scientific reports and research is a highly contentious issue. In the digital age, the scientific publishing industry has created a fortified oligarchy that threatens the integrity of scientific innovation. The sector benefits from publicly funded research to achieve more significant profit margins than Google, Amazon or Apple. Instead of advancing science, these publishers conceal government-funded research behind locked paywalls and charge high subscription fees for access.

Defined by the mantra “publish or perish,” scientists have become entangled in a game where their career prospects depend more on the publication of their work in prestigious journals than the merits of the work itself — a self-referential hierarchy that is carefully maintained by publishers to drive revenue. To gain this acceptance, scientists tend to publish the most eye-catching and unexpected results, feeding into what has been called the “reproducibility crisis in science.”

In a 2016 survey conducted by Nature, 70% of researchers noted that they have tried and failed to reproduce their colleagues’ experiments. This inability to reproduce experiments threatens the foundation and accuracy of scientific literature. This flawed system leads to an environment that fosters exclusivity and discourages data sharing among the scientific community, directly impacting the quality and caliber of the research produced.

From these fragilities came the birth of the open access movement, a campaign to make scientific content freely available to the public. The movement began in the early 2000s and sought to release papers from behind publishers’ paywalls. Over the past two decades, the movement has made steady progress, with a growing amount of academic research now available on an open basis. Nature’s recent announcement that authors from low- and lower-middle-income countries will be able to publish in its pages for free reflected the movement’s positive impact.

Despite these advances, “open science” has inherited many of the same limitations as mainstream science. Scientists may still be afraid to comment on a senior colleague’s research paper under their own name for fear of repercussions. This makes it less likely for scientists from disadvantaged backgrounds to participate in open science and could worsen existing scientific inequities. These issues are further exacerbated by publishers charging article processing charges (APCs) to make an article open access. As publishers raise APCs, institutions face direct financial pressure and must limit the number of grants they award.

Web2 protocols such as Git emerged to counter the restrictions of centralized version control systems and create an open-source alternative that enables software teams to create projects of all sizes with efficiency, speed and asynchronicity. This approach increases transparency and verifiability while also opening up new avenues for collaboration.

Web3 protocols such as the InterPlanetary File System have also emerged in response to the centralized web — the latter of which lacks privacy, sells our data to third parties and is prone to single points of failure. Both of the above inventions arose directly from the limitations of pre-internet scientific research.

Decentralizing science has no inherent economic incentives. It is a restorative mission to increase scientific funding, eliminate reliance on profit-hungry intermediaries and increase collaboration across the field. Decentralized entities and tools such as decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), quadratic funding and crowdsourcing can help scientists unlock alternative ways to fund more diverse scientific ventures. By disseminating scientific discoveries publicly via scalable tokenomics, DeSci can eliminate profiteering middlemen, such as publishers, and reshape the scientific publishing industry for the better.

Most importantly, DeSci harnesses the power of crowdsourcing, which enables scientists to pool their hypotheses and data to solve problems faster and more efficiently. Crowdsourcing platforms, originally designed to help machine learning engineers, are making larger data sets available for scientific studies and increasing the diversity of research projects. Those institutions using Web3 and blockchain tools will flourish, making traditional academic systems less optimal and attractive.

One thing is certain: Blockchain and Web3 are going to reshape academia for the better by providing scientists with the tools they need to efficiently and effectively produce disruptive research.

Matteo Manzi is the lead quant researcher at CrunchDAO. He has a background in machine learning and dynamical systems and was the co-founder of Poincaré Trajectories, which integrated into CrunchDAO in October 2022. Matteo graduated with a master’s degree in space flight with a talent scholarship from Delft University of Technology, worked as a researcher in the Horizon 2020 program by the European Commission in the United Kingdom and later worked as a flight dynamics software engineer for the Space Debris Office of the European Space Agency.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Decentralization is helping to shape the course of scientific research and business

May 10, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

Decentralized science, dubbed DeSci, is creating new markets for knowledge and new opportunities on commercial markets.

New technologies may have rapid, dramatic effects on society, but they may also spread slowly and subtly. Blockchain-powered decentralized science (DeSci) is taking off after some years of gestation. Its impact is being felt not only in the rarified confines of high-tech labs but more broadly in the business world as well.

Psychedelics and longevity

Paul Kohlhaas, co-founder and CEO of Molecule — a platform for biotech decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) founded in 2019 — spoke about pharmaceutical research and its funding on the Zima Red podcast in April. “We believe it could be way cheaper, if it was coordinated in a better way,” Kohlhaas said of pharmaceuticals research. “I think there’s this cultural and bureaucratic problem.”

Kohlhaas compared blockchain in pharma to fintech in banking. “The banking industry has only started evolving in the past 10 years in the wake of fintech, because fintech is starting to really hurt their bottom line and take away customers,” he said.

Molecule allows researchers, biotech companies and universities to combine data and intellectual property (IP) rights into IP-nonfungible tokens (IP-NFTs), thus creating a new market. The holder of an IP-NFT could solicit funding to continue research activities, or an organization can reach an agreement with the IP-NTF holder to use the data and IP for its own purposes.

Funding may also find new outlets. Kohlhaas mentioned psychedelics research in psychiatry as a priority that he embraces personally, as well as longevity. “Longevity startups are currently funded by billionaires,” he said. “But I think there's a risk there. Because if like the richest people in the world live longer and longer and get richer and richer, that will fundamentally, in the long run, create an unjust society, because wealth isn't distributed.”

Research Hub is a platform for open-access research that chief operating officer Patrick Joyce compared to GitHub for scientific research. Joyce told Cointelegraph that the platform, which has the backing of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, may eventually provide a serious incentive for open access publishing and to fund research in subjects that the National Science Foundation does not fund, such as quantum biology.

Businesses get blockchain boost

DeSci can provide an advantage in a number of commercial contexts. The crowded field of consumer genomics is an example. London-based Genomes.io offers the public 30x whole genome sequencing. This is in contrast to many more familiar brands that sequence only the genetic exome, passing over the “junk” genes that make up the vast majority of the genome and whose importance is rapidly being uncovered. “Not a week goes by without a discovery,” Genomes.io CEO and cofounder Aldo de Pape told Cointelegraph.

Genomes.io has 14 employees and is the second company de Pape and co-founder Mark Hahnel have been in together. The entrepreneurs met when they worked at MacMillan Publishers, and de Pape followed Hahnel to Figshare, a company that provides research data infrastructure to big government customers, which Hahnel launched in 2011.

In 2018, in anticipation of the gene mapping developments that have reduced the price of genetic sequencing from billions to hundreds of dollars, de Pape, Hahnel and three others founded Genomes.io. The following year, the company was accepted into the ConsenSys Ventures Tachyon 2.0 accelerator. It held an initial coin offering (ICO) in 2021.

Genomes.io sequences customers’ genomes, encrypts them and keeps them in an electronic vault. Customers can opt into receiving reports based on their genetic information, such as ancestry and rare disease carrier status, with a range of new topics planned to come.

Customers can also allow their data to be used in research queries. Query matching occurs within the data vault so that genomic data never leaves the vault. Blockchain technology provides security by recording all queries made to holders’ data in a single version of the ledger.

Holders who decide to share genomic information are rewarded with GENE, as are those who contribute to the development or design of the project through the DAO. GNOME is used for governance and is available on the Sushi exchange. The “Geneticats” NFT, available on OpenSea, offers genomic sequencing and hybrid GENE/GNOME benefits.

The barrier is low for participation in the DAO. “There is really lovely interest from people who wanted a closer relationship with the company,” de Pape said. Participants are rewarded bounties for contributing development and design ideas. The DAO has “no say on the Ltd. side,” which includes large-scale projects with partners in Australia, Bermuda and the United States.

Doing biometrics one better

Madrid-based DNAVerse has found another quite practical use for genomics. The company will use genetic information to confirm holders’ identities as human — as opposed to AI or chatbots — across metaverses. In conjunction with its sister organization, 3DforScience, DNAVerse creates “DNArt” NFTs that can be used comparably to avatars.

DNAVerse, according to marketing director Juan Castillo, is at the presale stage. It has eight employees and shares several more with 3DforScience. It recently partnered with Polygon Studios and has opened an embassy in the Matrix World metaverse. The company will mint 200 “cryptoprotein” NFTs and 3,200 highly customizable “DNArt” NFTs based on customers’ genetic data but not containing their data.

After the minting of all the “DNArt” NFTs, new customers will be required to select a “cryptoprotein” and “DNArt” staked on a decentralized market, with the holders receiving a percentage of the price for their participation in the replication process. Their genetic data will be delivered to customers, who remain in control of their data and have the option to remain anonymous. They will be gathered under the governance of a DAO that has yet to be formed.

There are a lot of clubby aspects to the business model. A line of clothing featuring customers’ “DNArt,” wellbeing channels and virtual events based on genetic affinities are planned. Customers can obtain “DNAat” for their pets as well.

DeSci

Psychedelics and longevity

Businesses get blockchain boost

Doing biometrics one better

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