Announcing ResearchCoin — a crypto token to help accelerate the pace of scientific research
Today, we’re announcing ResearchCoin, a way for users of ResearchHub to be rewarded for contributing content to ResearchHub. ResearchCoin represents ownership in the ResearchHub community through certain governance and usage rights. Our hope is that it will help further ResearchHub’s mission of accelerating the pace of scientific research.
Why did we make ResearchCoin?
Scientific research could be much more efficient.
- 1.8M papers are published each year and most of them are never read
- 50% of experiments are unable to be reproduced
- 85% of scientific knowledge is shared behind paywalls
The goal of ResearchHub is to build a community of people around the world who want to help solve this. We felt it would be incredible if the users who contribute content to ResearchHub were also rewarded for their efforts.
Imagine if the early contributors and users of Wikipedia, Uber, StackOverflow, or Reddit were rewarded for the robust communities they helped create.
With the launch of ResearchCoin, this is now possible. Whenever you add great content to ResearchHub (a new paper, comment, peer review, or key takeaway from a paper), you will be rewarded with ResearchCoin, in proportion to how valuable the community judges your contributions, in the form of upvotes. Every up-vote you receive on ResearchHub will earn you one ResearchCoin at launch. We may adjust this over time as the community grows.
The ResearchHub platform is governed by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), where owning ResearchCoin grants you voting rights in the ResearchHub DAO. ResearchCoin can also be used to boost the visibility of content and fund scientific research on ResearchHub.
Every time you earn a ResearchCoin on ResearchHub, it will count toward your reputation on the site. Users with higher reputation can act as moderators, and help ensure that submissions to ResearchHub abide by our community standards. Reputation on ResearchHub can only be earned through valuable contributions, and can never be bought.
How does the community ensure contributions are high quality?
It’s important for the ResearchHub community to maintain an open, respectful, and innovative culture while moderating unscientific content and behavior that violates our code of conduct.
To this end, ResearchHub is designed such that:
- With every up-vote, you earn one ResearchCoin and one reputation point at launch
- Any user can also down-vote a piece of content. Down-voted content will be seen less often or hidden over time.
- High reputation users (approximately in the top 10%) will also have the ability to flag, edit, or remove content that is low quality or off-topic.
This model intrinsically grants governance and moderation authority to users with high reputation, letting them set the tone of the site.
DAO
We have also launched a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to govern ResearchHub. This means that all holders of ResearchCoins will have the opportunity to participate in the governance of the site. This may include design parameters of the community as described above, decisions around how ResearchCoins are distributed to the community, and even recipients of large grants.
Conclusion
We’re excited to see how ResearchCoin will be able to accelerate scientific progress. Our hope is that ResearchHub will be able to align incentives among a group of like-minded individuals worldwide to help promote and advance scientific knowledge.
Please sign up on ResearchHub today to start contributing content and earning ResearchCoin.
If you would like to learn more about $RSC, check out the ResearchCoin Whitepaper!
Welcome to the ResearchHub community!
