DE-SCI IS NOT YET SO NEAR-TIME TO CHANGE THAT.
While everyone is familiar with DeFi in the NEAR ecosystem, there has been little activity in the realm of DeSci. However, this intern believes that DeSci, when done right, has huge potential to deliver outsized impacts in the real world. That’s why this is not just a post to educate but also a little call to action to consider getting some more DeSci going on the BOS.
DeSci is…
DeSci is short for decentralized science and describes a movement to build public infrastructure for funding, creating, reviewing, storing, and sharing scientific knowledge using web3 tools. The idea behind DeSci is to use web3 to address pitfalls in the way science is done at the moment and create an ecosystem where scientists can come together, research, and share results, all in a transparent manner.
The idea of DeSci is not new. It first came up in the early 2010s, but it took until 2021 for the idea to gain steam, kickstarted by another adjacent movement: Open Science. Open Science was an initiative trying to liberate science by making publishing more accessible. In 2021, they decided to raise funds for their cause through an NFT sale.
Raising 13 ETH didn’t just help them fund more of their work but also kick-started the launch of various other projects and DAOs focusing on combining science and the open web.
To understand the appeal of blockchain for science, it’s best to start with
What’s wrong with science?
Science is an engine for progress and a worldwide enterprise with constantly changing dynamics. As such, the challenges science faces can have a direct impact on us. Just think about research into medicines or climate science.
Funding & its distribution
Even though R&D spending in all OECD countries is increasing, that does not necessarily mean that we fund the initiatives that are most impactful. Many areas go underfunded because of a lack of attention or a lack of immediate commercialization. This glaring flaw is especially obvious when looking at the realm of Women’s Health. The National Institute of Health in the US spent exactly $0 on funding grants that research Menopause, something that nearly half of the population has to deal with eventually.
Additionally, receiving grants for research is hard. According to a survey by Fast Grants, top researchers spend up to 50% of their time just writing grant applications. The success of such applications does not translate into quality as often the committees deciding who receives a grant base their decision more on the number of papers published vs. quality, a measure also known as the h-index. It’s easy to see why young scientists struggle in such an environment.
Lack of replication
The whole idea of science is that your thesis is right until proven wrong, making replication a crucial part of establishing anything. However, replication is less likely to be published and hard to execute when the methods of the original study are opaque. Unfortunately, at times, scientific artifacts like code and reports are lost forever, not aiding things. This might explain why, for example, in psychology, only 36% — 47% of studies are ever reproduced.
Lack of access
Science is the epitome of a public good, and yet it’s often hidden behind a paywall and inaccessible. Even on the publishing side, things aren’t as straightforward, with the likes of Nature now charging $11,000 per paper with a few publishers in control of the entire market.
Enter DeSci
The most obvious use case for web3 in science is funding. As grants in traditional science have proven time-consuming and eliterian, blockchain-based crowdfunding could lead to better results. There has been plenty of experimentation in crypto with funding mechanisms, including quadratic funding and retroactive funding.
DAOs
One approach prominent in DeSci is that of leveraging DAOs to fund research in a specific area. For example, Hair DAO focuses on all things hair loss, and Athena DAO is funding critical research in Women’s Health. This allows individuals affected by certain areas to become agents of change. The valley of death, the gap between basic research and clinical research, could be overcome with DAOs since everyone involved has a vested interest in pushing for the results of any research to be commercialized and find human application.
IP NFTs
IP in science is hard to value and often held by universities without any incentive to deploy it. Web3 creates new models of financing the purchase of IPs and collaboration. Shareholders of IP are no longer limited to big corporate and the usual academic institutions but can be people like you and intern. Molecule, a Swiss web3 provider, has created a framework that ties together irl IP and an IP-NFT which can then be held by on-chain organizations. NFT owners can subsequently earn through licensing.
Open Access and Peer Review
Scientific data is already stored in part on IPFS to facilitate access and add unique identifiers as well as a history of changes to the data. However, one of the challenges the Open Science movements also ran into was quality control. When everyone can publish, there is no curation. Peer Review, currently done for free, could be enhanced via tokenization and commissioning through DAOs or publishers of certain studies. Ants Review suggests the use of smart contracts to intermediate between author and reviewer.
Web3 adds the necessary incentivized curation layer on top of a permissionless publishing process, allowing anyone to access data while finally acknowledging and rewarding the work of reviewers.
What about NEAR?
So far, there is very little to no DeSci built on NEAR. One example is OpenCann, a project accelerating the development of Cannabis-based therapeutics. It’s still fairly early in its development phase. OraSci is at a similar stage, having been built during a hackathon as an idea to facilitate the issuance and management of IP tokens.
OraSci enables users to tokenize NFT IPs, which can be used to token-gate access to research data and crowdfund for the use of certain IPs.
Nevertheless, BOS, as a unifying interface, has a lot more potential to help researchers come together and investigate issues that impact us all. As mentioned above, one critical piece of research publication is curation. The BOS could act as a layer where researchers can find a quality-controlled data set of data relevant to their areas. With the integration of existing solutions to address peer review like Ants Review, the BOS could even help non-web3 savvy reviewers to review and get paid for it.
With advances in LLMs and marketplace protocols like Ocean protocol that enable researchers to tap into data sets and train them, the BOS could also help aggregate access to said data, easing the user experience while aiding the discovery of various data sets.
There are countless ways NEAR, as the BOS, can help unify the DeSci experience and foster healthy discourse among scientists and individuals who want to fund research. Worth exploring, right?
Written by @NEAR_intern
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