Scienceroot Ecosystem
When asked about the difference between art and science, Neil De Grasse Tyson recently stated: “Without Beethoven, no one would have ever created the 5th Symphony. Without Einstein, maybe it would have taken us another 100 years, and the coordinated effort of many scientists, but we would have still discovered the theory of relativity.” Art means creation. Science means discovery. Yet both are of equal and crucial importance to the development of humankind.
Nowadays, we owe all the technological advancements surrounding us to the latter: the scientific method. This amazing 5-step process is the best method we have come up with for processing information about the natural world in the pursuit of truth: we observe, launch hypotheses based on those observations, we test these hypotheses, measure and interpret the results which the experiments yield, and reach a conclusion to be published. Thanks to this instrument, we now have life-saving medicine, electricity, satellites orbiting the planet, and a much deeper understanding of the world around us.
However, as important as Einstein was, most of the fore mentioned perks were the result of a coordinated effort of teams of scientists. Yet, have you ever considered how scientists are able to enhance our daily lives through their work? No, it’s not as depicted by Rick Sanchez (and trust me, we wish it was), but it is still quite entertaining, in its way. First, you have to think of a research proposal; what you want to discover, and more important, how you intend to prove your discovery. This can be achieved with consuming knowledge yet most of it is behind so called paywalls and not accessible to everyone. Next, you have to find a team of researchers. This is done through countless hours of writing emails to other scientists, or headhunting through the university With this part over, the “fun” part begins: securing funding for your experiment and publishing the observed results. These are the most tiresome steps. Many scientists, with various research proposals, are pitted against each other, fighting for the same financing sources. Then, with the publishing industry deciding what information is print-worthy, and what is not, there’s a struggle to have results published. In an ideal world, all science should be print-worthy, especially the very neglected “no-results were found” part.
Considering this situation, which encumbers the whole scientific process, we have developed a platform reuniting all 3 elements
of the research lifecycle, so that scientists are able to actually focus on science, rather than other unproductive, time-consuming activities. Figure I offers you a glimpse at the highlights of the scientific lifecycle as proposed by Scienceroot. Each branch — Collaboration, Funding, and Publishing — is detailed in the coming sections. Only one question remains: How is all of this possible?
The cornerstone of the Scienceroot project is represented by our blockchain based cryptocurrency, called Science Token (ST). We intend to build Scienceroot in such way so it can become the go-to platform for all scientist where all of their needs may be met. This will in turn allow us to enhance the performance of the platform in all of its aspects — attracting more and more consistent financing sources on Scienceroot, allowing more and more transparency in the publishing criteria, speeding up the whole scientific process, from research hypothesis to publishing time, and even securing funding for our own Scienceroot Fund (Section III), which the community will be able to invest as it sees fit.
I. THE COLLABORATION PLATFORM — the one place where scientists and other stakeholders from all around the world can:
- create profiles and connect with each other;
- share ideas;
- create research teams;
- exchange tokens among each other:
all that in a matter of seconds, through a well-designed registration system.
With ST providing the fuel for utilizing the features of our platform, researchers will be able to secure information for their experimental design and get feedback from experts in the domain on content and methodological issues. Furthermore, they will be able to discuss the acquisition of materials and equipment, and even exchange money amongst each other i.e. through tipping, or through conversion from other forms of currencies in Science Token.
II. THE FUNDING LIBRARY — the place where most financing sources, like research grants offered by various stakeholders, may be found indexed. Furthermore, we intend to offer scientists the opportunity to advertise their work proposals within the platform so they may secure funding from other various financing sources, such as Scienceroot Fund, private organizations, or even private Scienceroot users.
Imagine the Head of HR of a top organization is looking to find out how to identify top IT students for recruitment, and what these students are looking for in an employer. This person could contact a researcher via Scienceroot in order to have an expert look into the matter, all secured through blockchain and smart contract technology. Another use-case of this feature of the platform is the funding of specific scientific projects. Based on the same technology, anyone could donate any amount to scientists trying to answer a specific query. Everybody benefits from the work done by scientists, so we propose that everybody should also be able to support their work in a direct manner. However, the main objective of science is to help us expand our knowledge, and in order to achieve that, the information needs to be published for other researchers to have access to that information in order to verify or build upon it. This brings us to the last element of the research cycle, and the last component of the Scienceroot platform: our scientific journal.
III. THE SCIENCEROOT JOURNAL — an open access journal, offering publishing opportunities to all scientists, and ensuring an efficient publishing process through our AI-assisted review and peer-reviewers compensation system.
The access to the Journal will be enabled through registration on our platform, and all submitted articles will be free for access for all registered users. Authors will be required to pay the publishing costs (covered by research grant), however it will be possible for users to donate tokens to the author upon reading their article.
Scienceroot believes that profits should be split with the academic community, thus we will assure a compensation pool (20% of publishing costs) for the peer-reviewers. They are the ones who fact check the submitted articles, and we believe the whole publishing process will be enhanced through providing a rewarding compensation system for them. Another 20% of profits will be redirected towards the Scienceroot Fund, to be distributed towards research proposals as decided by the Scienceroot community. Both the Journal and the Fund will be divided amongst specific research domains such as Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Social Sciences, etc.
I mentioned Neil De Grasse Tyson in the beginning of this article. It gave me great joy when I heard that the famous astrophysicist will be hosting a new series of the TV show Cosmos, coming 2019. The new season, where aspects of our micro- and macro-cosmos are discussed, will be called Cosmos: Possible Worlds. It has a certain ring to it, right? Kind of makes you wonder what may still lie out there. If only there was a way for us to help scientists progress more swiftly in their advancements so that we wouldn’t have to speculate about possible worlds, but actually be able to discover them. This is exactly what is enabled by Scienceroot. You are the one that can help achieve the transition from possible worlds to existing worlds!
