Decentralized science plays a crucial role in addressing issues in academic research.

Both academia and science are currently facing a crisis characterized by numerous inefficiencies that directly affect our research capabilities and scientific effectiveness. The topic of stagnation within universities and academic institutions is often avoided, and dissenting intellectuals who question the established norms or the quality of scientific research find little room in this environment.

Decentralized science (DeSci) seeks to fundamentally change these systems for valid reasons. When combined with blockchain technology, DeSci has the potential to transform current funding models and improve collaboration among participants in scientific projects.

The accessibility of scientific reports and research remains a highly debated topic. In the digital era, the scientific publishing sector has established a fortified oligarchy that jeopardizes the integrity of scientific advancement. This industry profits from publicly funded research, achieving greater profit margins than companies like Google, Amazon, or Apple. Rather than promoting scientific progress, these publishers obscure government-funded research behind paywalls and impose steep subscription fees for access.

Guided by the principle of “publish or perish,” scientists find themselves caught in a system where their career opportunities hinge more on publishing in esteemed journals than on the intrinsic value of their research — a self-perpetuating hierarchy that publishers maintain to generate revenue. To gain acceptance, researchers often focus on publishing the most striking and unexpected findings, contributing to what is referred to as the “reproducibility crisis in science.”

A survey conducted by Nature in 2016 revealed that 70% of researchers reported unsuccessful attempts to replicate their colleagues’ experiments. This challenge in reproducing experiments undermines the foundation and reliability of scientific literature. Such a flawed system cultivates an environment that promotes exclusivity and discourages data sharing within the scientific community, adversely affecting the quality and standard of the research produced.

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From these vulnerabilities arose the open access movement, an initiative aimed at making scientific content freely accessible to the public. This movement began in the early 2000s and sought to liberate papers from the constraints of publishers’ paywalls. Over the last twenty years, the movement has made significant strides, with an increasing volume of academic research now available on an open-access basis. Nature’s recent decision to allow authors from low- and lower-middle-income countries to publish without charge reflects the positive influence of this movement.

Despite these advancements, “open science” has inherited many of the same challenges as traditional science. Researchers may still hesitate to critique a senior colleague’s paper under their own name due to fear of backlash. This situation makes it less likely for scientists from underrepresented backgrounds to engage in open science, potentially exacerbating existing inequities in the field. These challenges are further intensified by publishers imposing article processing charges (APCs) for open access, placing direct financial pressure on institutions and compelling them to restrict the number of grants they provide.

Web2 protocols like Git have emerged to address the limitations of centralized version control systems, offering an open-source alternative that allows software teams to develop projects of varying sizes with efficiency, speed, and asynchronicity. This method enhances transparency and verifiability while also creating new opportunities for collaboration.

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Web3 protocols, such as the InterPlanetary File System, have also arisen in response to the centralized web, which lacks privacy, sells user data to third parties, and is susceptible to single points of failure. Both innovations stem directly from the shortcomings of pre-internet scientific research.

Decentralizing science does not come with inherent economic incentives. It is a restorative effort aimed at increasing scientific funding, reducing dependence on profit-driven intermediaries, and fostering collaboration across the discipline. Decentralized entities and tools, including decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), quadratic funding, and crowdsourcing, can assist scientists in discovering alternative funding methods for a broader range of scientific initiatives. By publicly sharing scientific discoveries through scalable tokenomics, DeSci can eliminate profit-driven middlemen, such as publishers, and positively transform the scientific publishing landscape.

Crucially, DeSci leverages the power of crowdsourcing, allowing scientists to combine their hypotheses and data to address challenges more swiftly and effectively. Crowdsourcing platforms, initially designed to support machine learning engineers, are now providing larger datasets for scientific research and enhancing the diversity of research projects. Institutions that adopt Web3 and blockchain tools are likely to thrive, rendering traditional academic systems less efficient and appealing.

One certainty remains: Blockchain and Web3 are poised to positively transform academia by equipping scientists with the necessary tools to produce groundbreaking research efficiently and effectively.

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

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