Using DeSci to unlock scientific data - Can DeSci rip the wig off gatekeepers and disintermediate information

Intro to DeSci: unlocking scientific data

How information is restricted

But unlocking scientific data is a big ask because, as with any racket, the stakeholders don’t want to give up their golden goose. Today, if you want to access academic publications, you need permissions for private databases through an institution like a library or a university. Or you can pay wild per-article prices to get individual papers.

This is kind of crazy because scientists do the research, they write the articles, their peers review them for free, but everyone pays an intermediary called a journal publication to access the information. All along the way, the publishers are using the scientific process to create profit for themselves without doing any of the work.

As we discussed in part two of this DeSci blog series [LINK TO PART 2], another piece of the incentive imbalance in academia is the fact that scientists are required to continually publish papers to maintain their reputation and credibility, constantly seeking for publications and citations. This perpetuates the need for everyone to “publish or perish” and continue pumping content and money into the journal publishing industry.

Why the gatekeepers keep their power

It’s not difficult to see how restricting access to information slows down scientific progress and reduces the quality of work produced when quantity and obligation is driving the need to create it, rather than true scientific inquiry. But for some, it may be harder to understand why a lock and key has been allowed on all the information in the first place. The short answer is — money.

The largest journal publishing company, Elsevier, has about 16% of the total market and more than 3,000 academic journals. Martin Hagve says journal publishers are “unique in terms of their profitability, generating large net profits. Elsevier has a profit margin approaching 40%, which is higher than that of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Coca Cola, and the curve is pointing upwards.”

Hagve also points out that the journal publishing industry generates $19 billion a year, placing it in a league with the music and film industries. When you see it in that light, it’s easy to understand why these publisher cartels are sitting pretty with no motivation to change their centralized model.

Attempts at unlocking scientific data have yet to work

DeSci isn’t the first movement that has attempted to disintermediate information in the scientific community. Open access publishing has been trying to do this since the 1990s by moving the cost from the readers to the authors. The goal is to make information more freely available, therefore getting a wider audience and being worth it for the author to front the cost. However, in the open access model, it can cost an author thousands of dollars to publish an article. And we already understand that researchers have a hard time coming up with enough consistent funding.

Another movement that may be unlocking scientific data is just straight up: social media. When anything and everything is shared immediately and around the world on sites like Twitter and Facebook, information paywalls like journal databases become more ludicrous in everyone’s eyes. Anti-establishment mindsets are causing the general public to look more skeptically at centralized gatekeepers, including publishing cartels. And more and more people are pushing to disintermediate information in all corners of the internet. It’s not just an empty cry among the youths, either.

COVID showed us in the last two years that research can be sped up and information can be shared much more freely than it has been. The “social media publishing model” has also increased the public profile for many scientists, gaining them popular credibility the way publishing in an academic journal never did. But those aren’t real fixes, they’re workarounds. Social media is wild, unsecured, and rife with its own dramatic centralization horrors.

How DeSci is solving the problem

So how is DeSci unlocking scientific data and ripping the wig off the publishing cartel? I’m glad you asked.

Peer-to-peer peer review

The publishing cartel claims, as many intermediaries do, they play a vital role in the peer review process by creating blind reviews and upholding the integrity and quality of what gets published. Blockchain can blow a cannonball through that idea. Peer-to-peer paper reviews can be securely conducted without needing a pesky intermediary. Blind reviews can still easily be done by anonymizing the author without needing a trusted third party.

IP NFTs

Unlocking scientific data could pose a problem if its origin or authenticity can’t be verified. NFTs can solve this by allowing the original data owners to mint their intellectual property, ensuring its integrity on the blockchain. This can also prevent plagiarism because copied information will always be traceable to its source.

Tokenizing reputation

Reputation and credibility is important for scientists and researchers who need to be taken seriously. Right now, reputation is generated only by publishing in academic journals, and a scientist’s clout is permanently ensconced in the system, even if their body of work is disproven or becomes obsolete. Tokenizing a person’s research and publishing history can create dynamic reputations that update as their influence grows or diminishes over time.

Conclusion

The need to disintermediate information isn’t just a scourge in the scientific community. It’s a problem all over our digital-heavy world. After all, we do live in the information age. At this point in history, unlocking scientific data isn’t just something we want, it’s something that needs to happen if science wants to move forward with the rest of technology. DeSci is looking to do just that by creating new solutions and sweeping legacy centralized institutional structures away — as they should be. In the next part in this intro to DeSci series, we’re going to talk about how decentralization is not just impacting research and information, but existing scientific sectors.