How Blockchain Can Transform Science
I also published published this article at https://ecency.com/hive-196387/@mythcrusher/how-blockchain-can-transform-science
When people think of blockchain, they usually think of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. While cryptocurrency is great, it is certainly not the only use of blockchain technology. Another use rarely talked about is decentralized publishing and proof of intellectual property, which has potential to change many industries that use publishing, including science. This can be done either by using a decentralized publishing blockchain based platform, or by minting a book or article as an NFT on the Ethereum, Solana, or other blockchain that allows smart contracts, and then publishing somewhere else. In fact, a person can do both. While NFTs are often associated with bad, highly overpriced digital artwork, just like the blockchain technology they are based on, that is by far not their only use. NFTs used for publishing purposes can provide proof of ownership for self-published material, which could greatly benefit scientists and the lay public alike.
Benefits To Science
Ways in which it could benefit scientists is by allowing them to bypass gatekeepers at big journals, giving them ownership of their content, and having peer review done after publication rather than before. If an article is peer reviewed after it is published, that makes it much harder for other scientists to steal the idea. Ways it could benefit the public go beyond science, but as far as science goes, it could make most scientific articles open access and thus greatly increase scientific literacy. The push for decentralized publishing in science is part of a larger movement called science related populism.
Here is one tip for those interested in groundbreaking scientific research but don't know how to read and understand primary scientific articles: find an open source article on a topic that interests you using Google Scholar or ResearchGate, and if you come across a word you don't know, just google the definition. You may have to piece together an image of what the research is talking about by doing this with more than one article, but eventually you will gain a relatively clear understanding of the topic.
The Problem with Modern Science
To understand why the problem in science is so severe, we must take a look at history. For most of science history, or at since America existed, science was done in a way that promoted quality over quantity. Scientists would do research in their labs, gather lots of relevant data, and then publish their results. They would often go out on a limb with a novel theory, take a risk in pursuit of that theory, since it might turn out to be false, and then publish their findings once they gathered enough data to support it. If they failed to support their hypothesis, they would risk a possible blow to their reputation and access to funding, but it was a risk they were able to take. However, there is evidence that science no longer works that way.
How science works today is that quantity is favored over quality, and scientists are judged by how many papers they publish rather than the quality of their papers and research. This mentality has been referred to as "publish or perish" and has been criticized by many scientists, including ResearchGate founder Ijad Madisch, and physicist turned YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder. The reason quantity is valued over quality is because more papers means more grant money, which is increasingly what science is about these days.
The problem of science being mostly about grant money has gotten so bad that in many scientific professions, academic science researchers spend much of their time writing grant proposals rather than doing research or writing about it. In fact writing to grant providers to convince them that their research is important takes up the largest share of many scientists time on the job.
Proposals for Blockchain Assisted Science
There are scientists out there who advocate for blockchain use in science publishing, including the authors of the article "A Review on Blockchain Technology and Blockchain Projects Fostering Open Science" by Stephan Leible et. al. They argue that if science were made open in the way that they want, it would allow anyone to contribute to or participate in science, presumably including laypeople. There is also a project called SciNFT, which I learned about from Grok on X, that has a token called Sci token. Sci Token is a cryptocurrency dedicated to scientific NFTs, which will allow scientists to mint their research paper as an NFT. Once minted as an NFT, a scientist may publish their paper elsewhere.
One thing is for sure, and that is the need for something to change. Had science been this way in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it is likely that many of the greatest discoveries, including quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the discovery of how germs cause disease, would either have not been made, or would have been significantly delayed. Hopefully blockchain assisted post publication peer review helps get scientific research back to what it should be and at the same time makes science more open to the public.
References
https://www.researchgate.net/about
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/blockchain/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2019.00016/full
https://scienft.com/
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