Materials.Zone: Redefining Science in the Blockchain Era
Materials.zone aims to accelerate innovation 100x.
Scientific research remains largely undisrupted, and, if anything, receding in efficacy. The ‘publish or perish’ model traps scientists and researchers in a world where only 1% of research is accessible. What’s more, that 1% is only available to those with access to costly subscriptions. If researchers’ results are not included in an ever-increasingly exclusive clique of publications, they are unlikely to achieve any form of significant recognition. Even worse, a staggering amount of research is discarded or simply collected and ignored.
Who knows how many solutions to the world’s problems have already been uncovered, but not discovered? The chance to unlock the other 99% of data will ensure that no shred of data goes wasted.
Materials.Zone
The Materials.Zone platform was created to address these issues in the materials research field. The project went through seven years of research and development at the Institute of Nanotechnology in Bar Ilan University in Israel, before we made a brave leap into business, in order to share our solution with the world.
By creating a platform to automatically index and secure lab data, and the intellectual property (IP) rights related to its creators, vast amounts of research data that would be otherwise lost or hidden, can become accessible. This in turn can accelerate the materials economy, as consumers, looking for specific materials, now have the ability to search through data that was not accessible till now, or request the creation of such new data, with greater ease.
One Man’s Trash
An additional advantage of our system is the processing of failed experiments. Though data about failures can be very useful for other researchers, both in academia and in industry, the attempts that were made to publish “negative” or “null” results journals, were unsuccessful till now as the efforts made by researchers were not align with the incentives in place. The Materials.Zone platform allows for the cataloguing of all data entries, including “failed result” data points as they are being created in the lab with nearly no extra effort from the researcher. The results can then be shared with others, saving them from investing time, energy, and money into a futile endeavor, or perhaps make an unexpected result a part of a breakthrough elsewhere, through analytical tools and machine learning processes.
Status
The Materials.Zone website is live — go ahead and visit!
A growing number of labs and facilities are already using our platform to collect and share the data they create with team members and consortia partners. In Israel, the BINA labs in Bar Ilan University, and several labs at the Weizmann Institute. In Germany, the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB). In the UK, a few labs in Oxford are testing it as well.
Materials.Zone is also increasing its traction among industry leaders. The unique data our platform already has to offer is arising their interest as they are looking to cut down on time and R&D costs on the sprint to their next products and the materials they are made of.
Moving Forward
But wait, there’s more! Moving forward, there are plans to greatly increase the scope of the platform. Most importantly, a marketplace is being built to allow labs to monetize their data easily. The data can already be uploaded and indexed with the current platform, but the value of the platform as a whole will be exponentially increased when that same data can be searched by potential buyers, and purchased instantly through the platform itself.
In order to build these capabilities, Materials.Zone is building on the wave of innovation surrounding distributed ledgers, better known as blockchains. The advantages of blockchain technology allow Materials.Zone to build its goal — an Open Science Economy. This can be achieved by making all data trades through a cryptographic token, native to the Materials.Zone’s blockchain protocol. Combined with the ability to have an immutable IP recording and tracking system, and coupled with the disintermediation of middle parties that both incur expense and create inefficient frameworks for the propagation of data such as this in the current scheme, we believe will redefine science as we know it.
Additional Material
You can read here more about our story, where Bar Ilan University interviewed Dr. Assaf Anderson, Materials.Zone co-founder and CEO.
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Stay tuned — more news coming (very) soon.
