NFTs for the science sectors: ensuring total reliability of scientific data
NFTs were first introduced to the mainstream as overpriced digital art that lets users exchange it for crypto and prove their ownership with blockchain technology. At first glance, NFTs didn’t seem that worthy of a trend until we later learned how metadata, attributes, and private data (data only the current NFTs owners have access to) are built into the ERC-721 smart contract.
This structure and framework behind NFTs are where its value lies.
We now know that NFTs are capable of going beyond digital art as we’re starting to see various experiments in different industries. For example, NFTs are being used heavily in the gaming industry through blockchain play-to-earn games. Music artists use NFTs as a means to distribute their songs and multimedia creators use NFTs to sell their 3D assets. Even the education sector is revolutionized by the NFTs today.
But, what most people aren’t talking about or looking into is how NFTs and blockchain technology can tremendously affect the science sector. We’ll fill in the gaps!
NFTs for science could tackle crucial areas of the sector
Originally, the research regarding blockchain in science aimed at onboarding the tech for better and reliable record-keeping, but as time went on, more research went into how blockchain tech could fix one of the most important, yet very imperfect aspect of science — scientific research.
There were several concepts on how blockchain could improve scientific research, but up until now, more detailed blockchain solutions are being discussed and developed.
NFTs are one of them.
The ERC-721 token is built on the Ethereum platform, and because ETH is the 2nd largest blockchain, it beats every other blockchain in security apart from Bitcoin. Also, NFTs have the internal structure to fulfill the deliverables of scientific research and address some of its issues.
The problems with scientific research and how blockchain and NFTs can fix them
Reproducibility problems
There’s a consistent issue of scientific results published in scientific journals not being able to be replicated. There’s no record of how the research took place to get results. Things such as ideas, experiments, and study designs are not included. To make matters worse, researcher notebooks aren’t publicly available.
This has been delaying progress and advancements in the science sector for decades and there hasn’t been a strong effort to resolve it.
How NFTs can fix reproducibility issues
NFTs for scientists give the possibility to journal different aspects of their research or upload their research notebooks as NFTs. It makes it accessible to everyone and ownership can easily be proven.
Open access fees & publishing issues
Some researchers are forced to submit articles to subscription journals for a small fee as the APC (article processing charge) for open access journals costs thousands ($1000-$3000+).
Here’s the problem with subscription-based journals:
Some are notorious for publishing articles for payment — they don’t have anyone quality-checking, proofreading, and analyzing an article for its legitimacy. This inflates the amount of low-quality research in several scientific sub-sectors. Plus, it affects good research as it will be scrutinized just for being in a controversial journal.
Journals can heavily dictate the topic of the research they publish and this forces scholars to confine. If they don’t, they risk researching nothing.
Also, subscription-based journals can be expensive for universities and individuals, leaving them to use freely available information online.
How blockchain can fix publishing issues
Blockchain could easily resolve this as open access journals could become a blockchain ledger that anyone can submit to for either an extremely small transaction fee/processing fee.
Metrics used for individual success
Only two statistical factors are used to assess a scholar’s reputation — their number of publications and citations. As the world of scientific research isn’t transparent, these factors can easily be inflated to boost the scholar’s reputation.
How blockchain can fix the way success is measured
With blockchain technology, it would be easier to track data and find out correlations between several articles. Even better would be an algorithm that takes into not just publications and citations, but the research methods used, the complexity of the research and other useful factors that aren’t tracked.
Peer Reviewing Issues
There’s no proof that the peer review took place — peer-review is an anonymous practice and authors can suggest others to review their work. This promotes a bias in the peer reviews an article receives. Friends and family members reviewing the work will most likely provide a positive review. On the contrary, anonymous peer-reviewers can have a biased way of thinking and approach to methodology. This usually results in negative reviews.
Also, peer-reviewers aren’t obliged to share how they came to their conclusions, plus their anonymity guarantees they won’t be required to explain how too. Peer reviews are only seen by editors and authors too.
How NFTs and blockchain can fix peer-reviewing issues
Peer review is seen as academic labor as there are no incentives attached to it. With blockchain, however, the peer review process could be crowdsourced to ensure academic reliability. DEIP token is a web 3.0 blockchain project doing this through governance, F-NFTs, and DeFi (decentralized finance). We’re also introducing a proof-of-reputation system to reward reviewers.
NFTs in science is a worthy experiment!
The potential use cases and solutions it presents could transform the science sector as we know it. The scientific research world is very centralized and there are many unnecessary gatekeepers preventing research from being published.
Blockchain and NFTs for science could be the optimum solution that makes research more credible, affordable, and rewarding for peer reviewers.
We see, NFTs and science could be the next major trend in the blockchain world!
