DeSci Guide, the latest Web3 movement
Original title: "A Guide to DeSci, the Latest Web3 Movement"
Original author: Sarah Hamburg, cognitive neuroscientist, co-founder of phas3 and LYNX
Original compilation: Peter Pan, Rhythm BlockBeats
More and more scientists and entrepreneurs are using blockchain tools, including smart contracts and tokens, to try to improve modern science. Collectively, this work has become known as the Decentralized Science Movement, or DeSci.
DeSci is still in its infancy, at the intersection of two broad trends. One is the scientific community’s efforts to change the way research is funded and knowledge is shared; the other is a crypto-focused movement to take back ownership and value from the industry. But what exactly does DeSci mean?
The original author Sarah Hamburg is a cognitive neuroscientist and co-founder of blockchain consulting firm phas3 and LYNX, a company that uses blockchain Give wearable device users complete ownership and control over their biometric data, including brain data.
Recently, Sarah published an article designed to encourage scientists of all disciplines to join DeSci. And as the sport has grown, so has the need for open discussion. To that end, BlockBeats has compiled an introductory guide to DeSci by Sarah, covering how DeSci came to be, what its characteristics are, what are the main debates and unresolved issues facing the sport, and what are the what opportunities and challenges.
Why the DeSci Movement Started
The DeSci movement aims to strengthen science funding, free knowledge from information silos, remove reliance on profit-seeking intermediaries such as publisher groups, and strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration.
Funding is a particularly acute pain point for scientists, who spend as much as half of their time writing grant proposals. Success in securing funding is strongly correlated with metrics such as the H-index (H-index is a hybrid quantitative metric that can be used to assess the amount and level of a researcher's academic output), which quantifies the impact of what a scientist has published , and the resulting pressure on people to “die in silence” drives them to pursue newer research rather than work that is critical but less likely to grab the headlines.
Ultimately, underfunding and evaluation of indicators such as H-index not only reduce the scientific work in progress, but also lead to bias in the selection of projects by scientists, resulting in " Replication crisis" (replication crisis, an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate).
In addition, there is also a problem of "information access". Science is supposed to be a global public good, but much scientific knowledge is now trapped in paid journals and private databases. Making all types of data more accessible is a major goal of the "open science movement," which emerged more than a decade ago.
At the time, open science initiatives had a far-reaching impact, including the National Institutes of Health and other funding sources, requiring the publication of open access research result. On the other hand, for publication, there are also certain controversies. Today, journals still publish for a fee, with publicly funded scientists paying to publish their research (Nature charges more than $11,000 per paper). Today, science has not improved much. Some scholars argue that open access licensing also increasingly concentrates power in the hands of publishers.
DeSci application scenarios
Although DeSci aligns with Open Science's need to make scientific knowledge more accessible, it is not Open Science 2.0. It is a separate movement with different and evolving goals.
The main difference between DeSci and Open Science is its use of blockchain tools, which is similar to how blockchain has transformed other industries where The centralized ownership Web2 model is being challenged by the decentralized, shared ownership Web3 model.
While science-focused blockchain initiatives date back to 2015, they will not become a major event until 2021 due to a surge of new projects. Bigger movement, this includes the first Open Science NFT sold for 13 ETH. Later, research groups that auctioned NFTs gradually emerged, and multiple scientific-themed decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) also continued to grow; last October, the community-led blockchain event LisCon .
In addition, the resulting combination of DeSci and DAO is also applied to some specific aspects of scientific research, such as ScienceFund, OpenAccessDAO, and ResearchHub. Among them, bioscience and technology are in the leading position. These organizations include Molecule, VitaDAO, PsyDAO, Phage Directory, LabDAO and SCINET. At the same time, the environmental science DAO is also constantly developing, and in addition to the DAO, individual scientists are also experimenting with blockchain technology by launching their own research tokens.
Overall, DeSci's efforts have moved from purely theoretical ideas and small-scale technical experiments to attracting more participation, including funding university research And launch multiple DAOs of your own.
How DeSci Uses Blockchain Tools
1) Smart contract
While scientists conduct peer review (a process of reviewing scholarly output) for free, the scholarly publishing industry often acts as a review intermediary for huge profits, and Ants Review shows how smart contracts mediate directly between authors and peer reviewers, and They will be rewarded with Token.
2) Community incentives
Token / NFT can be used to incentivize the sharing, review and management of different types of information resources among the scientific community, such as "smart manuscripts" (link open source data and protocols) and article collections, which enable knowledge sharing and will be a new mode of rapid publishing and review.
Such communities can also improve the quality and availability of preprints (manuscripts published before peer review), which are essential for Rapid Science ) are critical, as scientists have become reliant on them during the COVID pandemic.
3) Fight against censorship
Responding to multiple U.S. governments’ claims of political interference in science, blockchain’s “permaweb” (permaweb is a layer of storage network built on Arweave) attributes, so that users can store data and information, and access it from any location at any time to prevent scientific scrutiny.
4) Funding model based on blockchain
As mentioned above, scientists and DAOs are currently experimenting with the issuance of NFT and Token to fund research, and future possibilities include:
—Adjust blockchain-based public welfare funding models, such as secondary funding and retroactive funding, by establishing platforms and protocols dedicated to science;
—Adapting emerging DeFi protocols to create sustainable long-term funding for scientists;
—Reaping rewards from commercializable output (e.g. drug IPNFT, the Scheibye-Knudsen lab analyzed 1.5 billion prescriptions for 4.8 million people over 40 years in the Danish National Health Service prescription database and correlated them with the survival rates of individuals prescribed certain drugs , which is an exclusive license agreement for the intellectual property resulting from these experiments) to fund further research and thus enable a self-sustaining scientific community.
5) Verifiable reputation
Currently, the reputation of scientists, as well as their ability to obtain funding, is often tied to some publication metrics. With the help of blockchain technology, scientists can earn NFTs by performing activities that the research community finds valuable, such as peer review, training and mentoring, and public sharing of data. NFT collections can serve as verifiable digital reputations to further incentivize such behavior. At the same time, groups of scientists and individuals with shared wallets, such as decentralized laboratories, can also build reputations in this way.
As academic institutions increasingly move learning online, the DeSci ecosystem may also be an attractive alternative to traditional science education. Students will be able to learn and build their digital reputations while engaging in community tasks, including traditional dissertation-performed tasks such as literature review, data cleaning and analysis, which will allow people to contribute to science while learning And get rewards. And the ability for anyone with an internet connection to contribute to the public good of science will help counteract the elitism that has historically plagued the field.
6) Ownership
Open science is often criticized for the potential risks of concentration in large commercial platforms with science. In the DeSci ecosystem, different aspects of science can be managed by independent professional communities. This both mitigates the risk of single platform dominance and helps address the rapidly changing science and technology and emerging threats of the future.
DeSci will also enable the community to become new "shareholders" of scientific knowledge (such as IPNFT through the DAO), and the value generated by these assets can then be used to fund the development of new knowledge Create to build a self-sustaining scientific ecology. In the case of the COVID vaccine, developed using publicly funded research techniques, the price of the vaccine is thus set by the community, which is open to all, and the subsequent flow of profits back to fund more communities with scientific research capabilities will be beneficial have a major impact on the health and prosperity of the world.
Some Controversy Surrounding DeSci
As the DeSci movement took shape, so did many broad unknowns and debates.
1) Is the name "DeSci" correct?
While decentralization is an important feature of DeSci, not everyone sees it as a defining feature. Some have also challenged the "Sci" designation, claiming that it excludes other forms of academic pursuits, including the arts, humanities and Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems.
2) What is DeSci movement?
DeSci lacks a clear set of shared values. Currently, different market segments are trying to come up with their own definitions of the problem.
3) Whose interests will DeSci ultimately serve?
Modern science serves a variety of industries, including scholarly publishing, higher education, and biopharmaceuticals. An assessment is needed to understand who and what DeSci's public interest should ultimately serve, and how blockchain technology can help make that happen.
4) How will DeSci protect science from the biases brought about by blockchain commercialization?
The DeSci community will only vote in favor of commercialization research (eg IP-generating projects) and not fundamental research. To help mitigate this bias, DAOs could use profits from commercial research to fund basic research. In addition, scientists focused on basic research can use blockchain technology to track the subsequent use of the resulting data, enabling them to earn royalties and be used to produce the basic work that downstream commercial research relies on.
What challenges will DeSci face
1) How to popularize DeSci
Non-scientists are able to tell the difference between a good project and a bad one, so strong reputation and governance systems become critical. DeSci will help with the assessment of project quality, validated projects can get wider community votes and get grant applications up front, and DAOs will benefit from designing governance systems for such edge cases. But what if the community is infiltrated by a large number of "Flat Earthers" (flat earth, as opposed to round earth, generally referring to some conservative diehards), who are committed to diverting funds from the treasury?
2) Diverse participation
The DeSci community will consist primarily of people already involved in the crypto and science fields, but women are currently underrepresented in both fields and there is a certain gender imbalance , so there will be corresponding deviations for some scientific conclusions made.
3) Build DeSci protocol
Decentralized science efforts have existed for many years, such as the famous science chain. The next new project in DeSci should try to understand the strengths and weaknesses of previous projects and summarize the experience. The movement will also benefit from experimenting with different blockchain technologies, especially those with low fees and minimal environmental impact.
4) Prioritize the end goal
At the end of the day, DeSci is a movement that attempts to improve science using a range of new tools. For DeSci to be successful, these tools need not be obtrusive but integrated seamlessly into scientists' daily work. So DeSci should focus on enabling scientists to do good science, not on these new tools themselves.
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