NFT New Experiment: We Use Paper NFTs to Donate to Scientists and Open Source Science
*This article was published on Daiguan, with the original title: "Compared to the Departing Beeple, Scientists Are More Worth Supporting | X-Order & Jizhi," author: * Jizhi Editorial Team
The value of Beeple lies in showing people the possibilities of the digital world. We want to bring this possibility into the field of scientific research, as technology can better lead the future.
We at X-Order will mint an NFT of a paper by Professor Zhang Jiang, the founder of one of the earliest scientific communities researching complex systems and artificial intelligence in China.
And this is just the first step in our support for the development of scientific research.
The following content is sourced from the Jizhi Club.
Direction: Why Science Will Move Towards Open Source
Technology is the light of civilization. The history of human technology is facing a transformation towards open source.
The ideal logic of the modern scientific research system is that the government obtains taxes from the public to support scientific research; scientists publish their discoveries in a timely manner to benefit society. However, immense professional pressure and various conflicts of interest have deeply entrenched the scientific research and academic exchange system, hindering academic communication.
As a profession, scientists are becoming increasingly specialized. Publishing papers is not only for exploration itself but also to produce significant results recognized by peers, receiving positive feedback in terms of funding, titles, and influence within the scientific system. At the same time, it is extremely difficult for scientists to receive direct returns after their papers have social impact or industrial applications.
This is the current state of the scientific community: on one hand, scientists are the drivers of civilizational progress, the sources of knowledge and innovation; on the other hand, they are the weak players in the scientific publishing and intellectual property system.
Thus, open source science is gradually rising. Open publishing, open data, and shared benefits are becoming increasingly popular.
The Jizhi Club is a proactive advocate for open source science. Established in 2003, it has been organizing online and offline activities and a series of reading clubs since 2008, and has published papers in multiple top journals through community member collaboration, as well as crowdfunded books like "The Extremes of Science: A Discussion on Artificial Intelligence" and "Approaching 2050."
We vaguely sense that science is facing a transformation, becoming more open and transparent. The trend is shifting from only sharing the results of scientific discoveries to fully sharing the thoughts, codes, literature, and formulas behind scientific exploration, and engaging in interdisciplinary, borderless collaboration.
The arrival of emerging technologies may accelerate our entry into the era of open source science.
Experiment: Trying Open Source Science with Paper NFTs
The Jizhi Club, in collaboration with X-Order, attempts to practice open source science by minting a new paper as an NFT (Non-fungible token).
Founded in 2003, the Jizhi Club is a group of explorers engaged in academic research and enjoying the fun of science, and it is one of the earliest scientific communities in China researching complex systems and artificial intelligence. X-Order is an investment research institution focused on digital currency and traditional finance, founded in early 2018 by Tao Rongqi, a founding partner of the well-known blockchain investment institution NGC Ventures, headquartered in Shanghai.
About NFTs:
The key innovation of NFTs lies in providing a method to mark the ownership of native digital assets (i.e., assets that exist in the digital world or originate from the digital world), and this ownership can exist outside centralized services or centralized repositories.
The ownership of an NFT does not prevent others from inspecting or reading it; NFTs do not capture information and then hide it, but rather capture information and reveal its relationship and value with all other information on the chain.
In other words, it is a digital asset issued on the blockchain, which can be game items, digital artworks, tickets, etc., and possesses uniqueness and non-replicability. Due to the inherent collectible nature of NFTs and their ease of trading, crypto artists can create unique digital artworks using NFTs.
We envision that academic papers can also attempt to mint NFTs like artworks. With the authorization of the paper's authors, we selected a paper from Professor Zhang Jiang's research group, which was newly uploaded to the preprint website arXiv in 2021, for this pioneering experiment:
Automated Discovery of Interactions and Dynamics for Large Networked Dynamical Systems
Abstract: Understanding the mechanisms of complex systems is crucial. Networked dynamical systems, which understand a system as a set of nodes interacting according to certain dynamic rules on a given network, are a powerful tool for building complex system models. However, finding such models based on behavioral time series is challenging. Traditional methods are only applicable to small networks and certain types of dynamics. A unified framework for automatic interaction network and dynamic discovery based on different network structures and dynamic types is proposed using Bernoulli network generators and Markov dynamic learners. Experimental results show that this method can be applied to large systems with thousands of nodes, accurately learning the real network dynamics.
Paper PDF version is now available on arXiv.
Value: Auctioning Paper NFTs to Donate to Scientists
In the two-hundred-year history of publishing scientific papers, the value of a paper is judged by journal editors; if deemed valuable, it is published; otherwise, it is rejected. It is also "voted on" by peer scientists; if the paper is important, it is cited; otherwise, it is ignored. Influence is the embodiment of a paper's value.
However, even if a paper's value is extremely high, such as Newton's principles of mechanics or Einstein's theory of relativity, scientists only gain academic reputation without direct economic value. This leads to countless scholars who contribute to the scientific edifice, working hard throughout their lives, yet still facing relative hardship. The chain of technology, industry, and commerce developed from scientific knowledge and principles that eventually benefits scientists is very long, often so long that by the time a theory is put into practice, the scientist who proposed it is no longer around.
We believe this is an extreme temporal and spatial dislocation between creation and reward.
Thus, we propose to combine paper publishing with NFT blockchain technology, adding a stamp to the paper without changing the copyright. Anyone who wins the auction for the paper NFT leaves their mark on the paper------
I am the owner of this paper NFT, having supported this research with real money.
Moreover, due to the digital revenue-sharing capability of NFTs, owners can resell their NFTs at a certain proportion (or even entirely), and so on. As a research outcome gains more attention, the value of the paper NFT will also rise, and all owners of shares in that paper NFT will benefit together.
Appendix: Introduction to NFT Auctions
Considering the need to achieve the above functionality—allowing owners to benefit as the value of the paper increases—we ultimately chose to use the NFT minting and collection protocol Zora as the platform for this paper's NFT release.
The paper NFT has been generated, and its IPFS address can be opened to read the paper:
The paper NFT auction address.
Open the paper NFT auction page and click Place a bid to participate in the auction.
In the Era of Open Source Science, Everyone Can Leave Their Name
Finally, it should be noted that since the NFT market has just emerged, the rules and rights are still unclear, so this NFT serves as an experiment, and we will gradually improve its rule design. We welcome feedback and suggestions from interested friends.
This is the first attempt to combine academic papers with NFTs, and whether it can form a trend remains to be seen. But we believe:
In the era of open source science, everyone participates, everyone shares, and everyone has the opportunity to leave their name in the history of science.