From funding to publishing, modern science is plagued by countless challenges that have hampered human progress.
However, developments in emerging technology like blockchain and Web 3 have put the concept of decentralization increasingly into focus in the field of science.
Start-ups, research institutions and scientists are taking note of the potential for disruption and embracing a new paradigm known as Decentralized Science (DeSci), which aims to address critical issues in scientific research and development.
In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of DeSci and why it’s important.
What Is Decentralized Science?
Decentralized Science, or DeSci, is a growing movement that aims to leverage emerging technologies like blockchain and the Web 3.0 to improve modern science, advance scientific research and help solve long-standing challenges in areas like funding, research, peer-review and publication. It also hopes to drive greater transparency and decentralization in scientific processes.
DeSci is based on the principle of decentralization and makes use of tools including NFTs, smart contracts, and DAOs to move science away from the control of centralized entities like research institutions and governments.
Moreover, Decentralized Science aims to develop a distributed and trustless science publication system, in a way that the role of traditional publishers and gatekeepers becomes obsolete, leading to the peer-review becoming more transparent and simplified.
Such a model can incentivize researchers to openly share their work while allowing scientific knowledge to be accessible to everyone.
Why Is Decentralized Science Needed?
Science has been central to solving some of humanity's biggest challenges and helping improve people's lives.
Scientific discoveries have allowed us to extend our lifespans, create new technology, put people on the moon and greatly extend the limitations of what the human race is capable of achieving. And it continues playing a significant role in virtually all aspects of our lives. However, modern science still faces a vast number of challenges that have repeatedly stifled further human progress.
Firstly, in order to establish a credible reputation in their field, researchers must typically publish their findings in a scientific journal, for which they must also pay a fee. Some of the most prestigious scientific publications charge as much as $5000 in processing fees for a single article, placing a heavy financial burden on scientists.
On top of that, there is a limited number of scientific journals that are deemed to be prestigious and thus this monopoly allows the publications to maintain a strict control over the scientific community. And as many also rely on a paywall for their readers, this model further restricts access to knowledge for both the masses and researchers.
While limiting information is one of the major obstacles faced by the scientific community, obtaining funding is another one. Conventional grant systems are also famously strict, leading to scientists having to give up on potentially revolutionary projects in favor of the types of research they managed to get funding for.
How Does Decentralized Science Work
Blockchain technology has the potential to revolutionize science and disrupt many of the outdated practices we just mentioned. For starters, decentralized science removes the need for gatekeepers and allows scientists to work more freely, while sharing knowledge with others in the community and fostering greater collaboration. It goes without saying that this alone could potentially pave the way for greater breakthroughs in the future.
With blockchain, researchers can build open, immutable, undeletable and censorship resistant databases that can also be an accurate record of the ownership of scientific findings.
The development of tokens in decentralized science can also be a valuable tool in helping finance projects, allowing anyone to become a patron or investor. This helps reduce the reliance of science on public or institutional funding.
The integration of smart contracts into scientific research and development can bring countless benefits in helping streamline the entire ecosystem.
And adding to all of this, at the convergence of all these three technologies, there are decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), that leverage the power of community to further scientific development. DAOs can be of particular significance in bringing attention to underresearched topics and funding research.
Let’s take a closer look at how decentralized science works and what areas this technology yield the highest impact:
Peer-Review Smart Contracts
Academic publishing is key for science and peer reviews are a central element in ensuring that scientific findings have credence. But while a critical process, peer-review is riddled with bottlenecks perpetuated by the existence of intermediaries and centralized oversight. Other issues include the lack of enough incentives for reviewers - who frequently do the work for free - and transparency challenges.
As such, the use of smart contracts can help establish clearer guidelines to regulate the peer-review process, without the need for third parties.
Intellectual Property Rights Attribution and Ownership
IP rights are a challenging aspect of traditional science. They’re either too difficult to value or remain largely unused by universities and other research centers. However, minting intellectual property as an non-fungible token opens new use cases for an IP. For one, they can help guarantee transparent value to creators and reward researchers, while also being a finance vehicle whereby an IP NFT can be traded in a marketplace, collateralized OR borrowed against.
In addition, tokenizing IP rights also provides a way of detecting wrongful attributions. Lastly, this model makes the finding, buying and selling of IPs much easier as interested parties don’t have to rely on traditional intermediaries such as publishers, lawyers and technology transfer entities.
DAOs and Community
Emerging as an alternative to traditional corporations and research entities, decentralized communities aim to connect like-minded people with a common goal as their foundation. If you’d like to know more about DAOs, make sure to check out our in-depth guide.
In particular, science-focused decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) share competitive resources in order to move forward science projects that frequently lack funding or visibility.
Token-based mechanisms offer rewards to DAO members and incentivize collaboration, data sharing and financing. Within such a community, scientists can work together, build on their knowledge and share experiences that can lead to potentially revolutionary breakthroughs in science.
Benefits of Decentralized Science
New Funding Opportunities
So far, scientific research has largely depended on the capital of deep-pocketed academic institutions and investors, with acquiring grants being traditionally a slow and bureaucracy-ridden process. It’s equally challenging for scientists that project decisions become attached to the entities financing it, making a top-down process that leaves little margin for the exploration of other avenues outside the strict scope of the project.
With the introduction of blockchain technology, researchers can instead resort to crowdfunding to get funds quicker and in a cheaper way. When it comes to DAOs, members of the community get to have an active participation in the projects they’re funding while also reaping the rewards if it turns out to be a successful bet.
Higher Efficiency and Credibility
As a public ledger, a blockchain records all transactions made within the network and makes them publicly available for others to access and verify. Naturally, this is a great foundation for a better system of peer reviewers as it can take place in a credible and transparent ecosystem. It’s also a valuable tool in securing records such as research data and publications, and making sure they’re not only safely stored but that they’re impossible to be tampered with.
Another benefit brought by decentralized science in this context is that having a decentralized model makes processes more efficient as scientists can more rapidly respond to any development and changes in the field.
Democratizes Access To Resources
DeSci is based on the idea of enabling broader participation and rooting out inefficient processes in science like the intervention of intermediaries and gatekeepers that retain a monopoly over large swathes of the scientific community. Leveraging the decentralized properties of blockchain, DeSci can open science to a broader set of people and make scientific data freely accessible to anyone around the world, while also promoting the sharing of resources without the usual red tape.
Fosters Collaboration and Innovation
As it stands, a significant amount of scientific data is sitting in silos across different organizations. This information is not accessible by different scientists who could otherwise make use of it and embark on collaborative research projects.
Decentralized science is upending this problem by bringing together participants beyond the allowing for more diverse funding sources to support a particular project. DeSci democratizes science so that anyone can participate and join forces to drive greater innovation through mechanisms like DAOs, which have a clear infrastructure and governance in place to support cooperation between members.
DeSci Projects
While the technology might be fairly new, there are already a number of projects implementing the principles of decentralized finance and making important contributions toward advancing scientific progress. DeSci, of course, can be applied across many different fields within science, but biotech has taken a clear early lead. Let’s take a look at some successful examples:
VitaDAO
As one of the most active biotech DAOs, Vita is dedicated to raising early stage funding toward human longevity research and drug development. This project also relies on collective R&D enabled by blockchain technology, while collectively funding and digitizing research in the form of IP-NFTs. Holders of VITA tokens get to decide on key decisions and early results have been promising. The project has, for example, recently helped a group of Danish researchers at the Scheibye-Knudsen Lab fund a study to repurpose existing FDA-approved drugs into anti-aging medicine.
labDAO
labDAO is a decentralized community that aims to bridge the gap between the stages of funding scientific research and distributing it. More specifically, this project centers on a community-run network of laboratories and optimizing R&D.
Opscientia
This DeSci DAO describes itself as a community of open science activists, researchers, organizers and enthusiasts that are focused on solving problems like data sharing, reproducibility, incentive alignment, coordination, and intellectual ownership that plague knowledge creation today.
SCINET
As a decentralized science research and development platform, SCINET supports funding for research and science projects in the health industry, and provides support across other areas including securing IP rights, peer-review and publishing.
GenomesDAO
his DAO is a biotech focused on safe, private and auditable monetization of genomic data using DeFi. The project also has an NFT spinoff.
PsyDAO
With the goal of funding research at the intersection of psychedelics and mental health, PsyDAO is an upcoming biotech DAO that promises to explore untouched corners of science.
Bottom Line
DeSci is quickly emerging as a reliable alternative to the way in which traditional science works, providing researchers and scientists with pathways for greater ownership over scientific data and IP, funding opportunities, more transparent peer-review and open access to the entire community.
For this, decentralized science leverages blockchain-based tools like smart contracts and tokens, with the aim of moving science forward and achieving breakthroughs once thought to be decades away - if not impossible to be reached altogether.
