Scienceroot is Leveraging Blockchain Technology to Transform the Scientific and Research Community

The discoveries made through pure scientific research have the potential to cure disease, save the environment, fend off starvation, and improve everyone’s quality of life. They are arguably the most important contributions being made to the advancement of human kind.

The current system of attaining funding, collaborating, and publishing findings however, is outdated, inefficient, and ready for disruption.

Scienceroot is a project that aims to leverage the decentralizing power of blockchain technology and the incentivizing power of cryptoeconomics to solve the biggest problems with the status quo.

Let’s go through each of the problems in detail and how Scienceroot can solve them:

Funding

Funding for pure research is increasingly in short supply. According to a 2016 OECD report, R&D spending by governments has been declining in many countries as policy priorities such as state pensions, health and social care are absorbing a growing share of public resources.

As governments struggle to pay the bills to support their aging societies while tax revenue is declining, the future of funding for scientific research may indeed follow the crowd-funding model currently being deployed by blockchain companies. 2017 has seen almost $4 billion raised through a new funding model known as the Initial Coin Offering (ICO). The ICO model enables micro-contributions on a global scale with almost zero of the inefficiencies traditionally associated with transaction fees and the cost of employing a trusted intermediary.

Blockchain technology offers the possibility to create a non-inflationary currency which can be exchanged instantly regardless of the user’s location. This makes it much easier for both the global scientific and non-scientific community to get directly involved in promoting science by investing their money in a worthy cause.

Scienceroot is following in the footsteps of the non-profit blockchain project Einsteinium, which has the philanthropic objective of funding scientific research. But Scienceroot is much more than just a funding platform.

Publishing

The current journal publishing system does not sufficiently incentivize the sharing of research and therefore does not efficiently share knowledge globally. In the current system, journal contributors are incentivized only by the necessity to publish their work in order to be acknowledged in the world of academia. According to the 2015 “STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing,” a typical reviewer spends just five hours per research paper and reviews only about eight articles per year. These numbers are so small because contributors are not rewarded for their time. Additionally, outdated submission and editorial technology combined with a shortage of qualified reviewers (due the lack of incentive) results in long waiting times for the reviewing and publishing of article. The status quo is stifling the advancement of science.

Three aspects of blockchain technology combine to solve the above problems. First, blockchain reduces costs by eliminating the need for an intermediary. In the case of journals, this typically represents about 15% of the total publishing cost. Second, blockchain efficiently enables payments to be made on a global scale (as described above). Third, blockchain offers economic incentivizes. With scientists having the potential to obtain profits from their published work and peer-reviewers receiving compensation for their contributions, the quality and quantity of shared research should increase dramatically (to everyone’s benefit).

Scienceroot has developed a system that can achieve all of the above benefits using blockchain smart contract technology to ensure an unbiased process and artificial intelligence to ensure efficient automation. By offering well deserved rewards to contributors while streamlining the submission and review process, Scienceroot will drive the scholarly community to new heights. Details of this system, which comprise both the first stage as well as the heart of the Scienceroot project, can be found in the Scienceroot whitepaper.

Collaboration

In order to produce ground-breaking research, efficient collaboration tools are needed. The status quo is a disparate array of loosely connected forums and bulletin boards. It can be a particular challenge for scientists to verify the credentials of potential collaborators, especially in a globalized research context.

Here again, blockchain technology offers a solution. Blockchain projects such as Civic are currently in the process of building a personal verification system that can easily be integrated into other platforms while protecting the personal information of participants. A potential collaborator’s credentials, once verified by a system like Civic, can be instantly confirmed to third parties while revealing nothing else about them.

Additionally by employing blockchain smart contracts in the sharing of information and intellectual property rights along the collaboration process, Scienceroot eliminates the need for the middlemen. As the Scienceroot Journal expands, it has the potential to become a critical point of both connection and protection for the global science community.

Finding Grants and Jobs

The current process of applying for grants is inefficient due to the lack of organization of funding opportunities available to researchers. The process of finding a grant which best suits a scientist’s needs is made even more difficult because of an abundance of grant-related scams, confusing ads, and subscription-based directories. The need for a standardized, transparent and centralized platform which connects applicants directly to funding organizations is now bigger than ever. Scientists need a place to allow them to have an overview of funding options, a chance to apply for grants and a way of accessing new opportunities in their field.

Here again blockchain technology has the power to streamline this process. Smart contracts could be written to, for example, only release portions of a grant as specific milestones are reached. Scienceroot anticipates the network effects triggered by the introduction of the Scienceroot journal and extended by the collaboration platform, will feed the grants and jobs platform in a synchronistic fashion.

Storage and Content

A final component that is again sorely lacking in the status quo, is the storage of research data. While great strides have been taken over the last decade to store data in digital form across multiple locations, there is still the issue of sensitive data being susceptible to hacking. Anytime a large of amount of data is stored on a centralized server, it becomes a target for hackers.

Here blockchain technology — specifically the Interplanetary File System(IPFS), a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open — has been proven to efficiently store data in a distributed and decentralized fashion that makes it essentially impossible to hack.

This gives Scienceroot the means to create a decentralized archive for the entire database of scientific, technical, and medical content to which anyone at anytime can have access. Because of the decentralized redundancy of the storage protocol, this database should last for generations to come.

While still in its early stages, Scienceroot is well on its way to contributing to the advancement of science by enabling efficient funding, publishing, collaboration, grant application, and data storage. To find out more, subscribeto the mailing list and visit the website.

You can also engage directly with the project through our Telegram channel @scienceroot