Decentralized Scientific Ecosystem: Building a Better Economy for Scientific Research

Original Title: 《The Decentralized Science Ecosystem: Building a Better Research Economy》

Written by: Stephanie Dunbar, Stephen Basile, Messari

Translated by: BlockTurbo

Scientific knowledge is a public good that underpins technological development and economic growth. However, the current scientific system is rife with inefficiencies, rent-seeking activities, and low transparency that hinder innovation.

In response, the decentralized science (DeSci) movement is launching new systems to sustain, implement, and disseminate open science. Nearly 50 DeSci projects were initiated just last year, and early capital has begun to take notice. Pfizer supports longevity research by participating in the latest funding round of VitaDAO, while Balaji is an early supporter of projects like Scholar and DBDAO. These projects provide opportunities for builders, investors, researchers, and community members to engage in developing the economy and furthering public goods.

Why Choose DeSci? Breaking the Scientific Lifecycle

The current scientific research economy incentivizes prestige acquisition at the expense of transparency and innovation. Researchers must navigate a landscape dominated by rent-seeking monopolies (research institutions), misaligned reviewers, and dual gatekeepers (publishers).

The system is plagued by various issues that can be broadly categorized into three main types:

1. Centralized Decision-Making and Funding

Research is often funded by small groups of decision-makers driven by government grants or corporate interests. Both show inherent biases toward the subjects they fund. This creates a negative feedback loop where researchers tailor labor-intensive funding applications based on what they believe is most likely to be selected, sacrificing their most passionate hypotheses. As a result, research variance is significantly narrowed. For example, billions of dollars are allocated to a single theory in Alzheimer's research, while promising new ideas continue to be denied funding.

2. Poor Methodological and Data Transparency

Bad science can persist for a long time, as researchers must "publish or perish" to secure employment and funding. Additionally, the lack of transparency in data and methods makes it difficult (if not impossible) for others to verify or build upon existing results. This has led to a "replication crisis," with estimates suggesting that over 50% of research papers cannot be reproduced, and 85% of biomedical research spending is wasted on poorly designed and redundant studies.

3. Disincentivized Review and Strict Control of Publication

Manuscripts must pass through a small group of unpaid peer reviewers before being considered for publication. This leads to significant publication delays, biases against competing ideas, and insufficient attention to detail. Countless scandals involving false reporting, image manipulation, and impact factor score manipulation have resulted in a tenfold increase in the number of retracted articles over the past decade.

Meanwhile, traditional scientific publishers continue to hit scientists with thousands of dollars in article processing fees and high reader subscription costs. The most disturbing aspect of this system is that the public pays for scientific research twice: first through taxes that fund the research, and then by subscribing to publishers to access the results. Ultimately, publishers' profit margins range from 20% to 50%.

Call for Open Science

In response to these issues, the open science movement has emerged with the rise of the internet. It is a commitment to open and fair data, manuscripts, and collaboration. Pioneers like the Open Science Foundation award badges to researchers who publish manuscripts with open data and methods. The movement utilizes Web2 coordination tools, primarily relying on volunteers and donations. While many open science organizations still exist today, many have struggled to maintain operations or keep costs low for end users (researchers and readers):

• Sci-Hub: An open access website where its founder publishes research from various journals. The platform is considered illegal and often faces threats of shutdown;
• Experiment: A crowdfunding site for independent researchers' projects. The platform relies on one staff member per project to review submissions and charges an 8% platform fee and about 3% payment processing fee;
• PLOS: An open-access publisher that inevitably passes on the costs of staffing and website maintenance to applicants. The fees for publishing on PLOS are similar to those of traditional journals.

Moreover, for well-known reasons, open-access journals have accepted fraudulent papers at an alarming rate, leading to difficulties in verifiability in the field. Open science is undoubtedly a step in the right direction, but after more than twenty years, many builders have realized that additional coordination, incentives, and verification tools are needed to usher in the next wave of open research.

The Rise of DeSci

The DeSci ecosystem encompasses a variety of projects that address some or all of the issues in the research economy.

Token-incentivized research ecosystems, such as Brian Armstrong's research center, tackle multiple mitigations of the scientific lifecycle. Other DeSci projects are building core focus areas and can modularly integrate with other projects in the stack.

Whether modular or singular, each DeSci project aims to contribute to scientific advancement by: democratizing funding, increasing methodological and data transparency, incentivizing review, and promoting open access to scientific knowledge.

Funding

DeSci primarily funds research through DAOs that facilitate community-based decision-making. Many DAOs have specific focus areas, such as VitaDAO funding longevity research and FrontierDAO focusing on space exploration. Others, like LoveDAO and VibeBio, plan to fund a range of medical solutions identified by their communities. Handing funding decisions over to the community can foster the development of tailored and targeted solutions that are often overlooked in traditional, profit-driven environments.

Coordination Mechanisms and Value Accumulation

Funding DAOs typically revolve around governance tokens or NFTs to establish treasuries and vote on research proposals. They can also receive external funding and donations, such as Gitcoin, which held its latest round of DeSci funding from July to September 2022.

To sustain operations, DAOs can monetize the intellectual property (IP) generated from the research they fund.

IP-NFTs, first proposed by Molecule in August 2021, legally protect IP generated from research. They are a unique alternative to traditional patents, which are used to hoard and restrict data and slow down scientific discoveries. IP-NFTs allow DAOs to monetize their work in various ways:

• Licensing IP for commercialization by other entities
• Splitting ownership with partners
• Trading data on open markets while maintaining creator royalties
• Holding as collateral for loans

IP-NFTs also enable new research coordination mechanisms, such as access control for verified participants to contribute to research and receive compensation. Over time, the boundaries of many funding DAOs may blur, and their communities may evolve comprehensively to address other parts of the research economy.

Transparent Research Methods and Datasets

DeSci can clarify the structure and conduct of research. In this regard, many funding DAOs utilize external entities like contract research organizations (CROs) to complete research inquiries, although many emerging DeSci-focused research organizations exist. For example, members of LabDAO can initiate and join research projects and share services and tools, while In Real Lab (IRL) is a molecular biology collaborative space focused on DeSci.

Coordination Mechanisms and Value Accumulation

IP-NFTs are an example of how contributors discover and engage with research projects funded by DAOs. The Molecule marketplace matches projects with potential investors, and results can be added as IP-NFT metadata.

OpSci is taking a different approach by marking the identities, certificates, and projects of independent researchers or groups as Impact Certificate NFTs.

Impact Certificates will pair with other protocols, such as Holonym for decentralized identity and credential verification, and primitives like Hypercerts for tracking research methods and progress. Hypercerts are ERC-1155 tokens representing research methods, datasets, and achievements. Researchers can attract funding on open platforms by transparently displaying the details of their work over time. Ownership of transparent datasets is verified on public ledgers, thus providing protection.

Incentivizing Peer Review and Open Publishing

By now, it may be clear how researchers and project teams, along with their datasets, methods, and results, are being tokenized. The same applies to manuscripts. In DeSci, users must pay to upload or access scientific reports, while the current journal publishing system is replaced by a permissionless data layer and marketplace fees. Fees are extracted for those wishing to buy or sell research ownership; thus, researchers can freely showcase their manuscripts, just as NFTs can be freely viewed on marketplaces like OpenSea. The review process is also more flexible, as researchers can leverage independent peer review protocols.

Coordination Mechanisms and Value Accumulation

Projects like Ants-Review propose an incentivized peer review protocol on Ethereum, where community members hold professional paid review committees accountable. Researchers pay the protocol to review their research, but payments to reviewers are only released once the community votes to confirm that thorough review requirements have been met.

In terms of publication, DeSci Labs' DeSci Nodes application allows researchers to create and publish FAIR-compliant research objects on open, decentralized repositories. Research objects include manuscripts, code, datasets, videos, etc., and are interconnected for reproducibility and replicability.

All components of research are citable and accumulate credit to a single point through linked persistent identifiers and decentralized resolver systems. Developers can build applications on top of this open data layer to achieve custom coordination and value accumulation mechanisms. These applications can modularly integrate with other parts of the DeSci stack; for example, using peer review results from Ants-Review and OpSci Impact Certificates to verify identities and work histories.

Data, Tools, and Infrastructure

DeSci relies on data, and a lot of it. Protocols like Data Lake, CureDAO, and Fleming Protocol allow individuals to monetize their personal health data and medical records for researchers to purchase. Using DB DAO, DAOs can manage their collected datasets by marking each row in the database as an NFT, with contributors receiving query fees when accessing their data.

Further down the research lifecycle, DeSci NFTs (IP-NFTs, Impact Certificates, Hypercerts, research objects, etc.) are stored in decentralized solutions, including IPFS and Arweave. Projects like Bacalhau allow users to execute computational jobs directly where datasets are stored (Compute Over Data). Each job outputs a unique content identifier (CID) on IPFS, creating provable links between datasets that support reproducibility. Bacalhau also helps streamline researchers' workflows, as downloading large datasets locally is often impractical.

Finally, DAO tool services, such as those provided by bio.xyz, a launchpad derived from Molecule, help DeSci DAOs establish a foothold. The launchpad provides initial support and grant funding for various biotechnology-funded DAOs, including VitaDAO, PsyDAO, HairDAO, and ValleyDAO.

Challenges and Risks

DeSci is an emerging ecosystem that has yet to be battle-tested. Most DeSci projects (78%) were initiated in the past year and a half, starting from the peak of the last bull market in Q4 2021. The surge in project launches coincided with the first DeSci track held during the Ethereum conference at LisCon in October 2021.

Most protocols have not yet fully launched on the mainnet. There are various emerging designs for the DeSci ecosystem, and it remains to be seen which projects will successfully capture value and sustain operations. Future challenges include:

• Intellectual Property: Conducting research does not necessarily guarantee useful results. The IP-NFT community may struggle to monetize IP, impacting their bottom line. Additionally, negotiating intellectual property with research institutions may require significant effort through funding DAOs, as traditional institutions are accustomed to receiving most of the IP produced by their researchers.
• Verifiability: Decentralized identity and data verification protocols are still in their infancy. Until they mature, there is a risk that researchers may misrepresent their qualifications to attract funding and potentially promote fraudulent results.
• Reproducibility: Open and verifiable methods and datasets may lead to better reproducibility, but replicating research has not been incentivized. Projects like Scholar and DeSci Labs are in the early stages of building incentive protocols for replicating research.
• Regulatory Compliance: Storing data on decentralized networks like IPFS or Arweave may not be considered compliant with GDPR or HIPAA. Projects will need to work with regulators to establish the legality of DeSci practices.

Addressing these challenges is crucial for bringing legitimacy to the DeSci economy and further attracting funding, application development, and research participation.

Conclusion

DeSci is a daunting task, with most projects still in their early stages. However, there are many untapped opportunities for individuals to benefit from contributions to public goods. Communities can fund the research that matters most to them, scientists can more easily profit from their workflows, and the entire system can become stronger by defaulting to open and verifiable data practices. Transparent datasets and methods enhance reproducibility. In turn, scientific discoveries may become more frequent and fruitful, benefiting all participants in the DeSci economy.