Written by DoctorStrange
Where does the money come from? Where does the money go? The source and use of funds have always been the primary issues in scientific research.
After the great plague in Europe in the 14th century, the stories of God promoted by religious organizations were no longer enough to heal the world's trauma and answer the public's doubts about the real world. Therefore, church organizations such as Christianity and Catholicism began to fund some of their believers to conduct research in astrophysics, biomedicine and chemistry, and become natural philosophers. The names of some believers are still recorded in history, such as Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, etc.
After natural philosophy surpassed its predecessor and parted ways with religion, kings and nobles replaced the church as the biggest "financiers" of scientists (as well as craftsmen and artists who are not mentioned in this article but are equally important) in order to maintain the technical needs of their rule and the reputation needs of "keeping mysterious followers and platforms". Of course, the powerful class is not the only sponsor of scientific research activities. After the Renaissance, the political culture and scientific awareness of the general public were enlightened, and they actively participated in scientific research activities, making science no longer the exclusive hobby of the aristocratic elite. Citizen Science and Open Science began to rise in the 17th century and played an important auxiliary role in the development of science in the following hundreds of years.
But no one expected that the scientists in the ivory tower (the academic community) would eventually turn back into an organization with the most religious beliefs. The academic world gradually evolved into a hierarchical academic authority with the power of "godfathers" and "popes", and funding was centered on these authorities.
The tension between conservatives and reformists is the driving force of civilization progress. Just like the natural philosophy that opposed religious fundamentalism, the Decentralized Science (DeSci) movement has begun to rise in recent years. As a continuation of the citizen science movement over the past few hundred years, it opposes the current overly centralized traditional scientific research method. The infrastructure supporting the DeSci movement is Web3.0 based on blockchain technology.
1. What is the starting point of the DeSci movement?
Before the troops move, the money and food must go first
The "money-burning" and energy-consuming nature of modern scientific research activities is beyond the imagination of the general public. In August 2022, Naomi Oreskes, a professor at Harvard University, published an article titled "Science Needs to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint" in the famous popular science magazine "Scientific American"[1]. The article points out that current scientific research activities consume a huge amount of energy. For example, the total amount of carbon dioxide emitted by major observatories around the world during operation is estimated to be nearly 20 million tons[2]. In addition, the carbon dioxide emitted by the entire cloud storage and computing field also exceeds that of the aviation industry, which was previously criticized for its high oil consumption (emitting an average of about 2.4 million tons of carbon dioxide per day)[3].
Following the product operation logic of the Internet industry, modern scientific research activities can be divided into three major components, each of which consumes very different amounts of human and material resources:
① Backend: The infrastructure that supports the operation of the scientific research system in the background, including the construction and daily maintenance of laboratories and supporting resources. For example, the annual electricity bill of a laboratory building can reach hundreds of millions of yuan (especially when it is equipped with supercomputers with energy consumption comparable to mining), and the value of instruments in a laboratory can reach hundreds of millions of yuan (especially for disciplines based on instrument operation such as experimental physics and chemistry). This process is the most expensive part.
② Middle end: This is the part that can be replicated and migrated. It is basically the same in all disciplines around the world. It is mainly "paper work", which can also be called "scientific research for Office software and printers". Researchers spend more than half of their time and energy on writing fund applications, fund assessments and project completion reports. Otherwise, there will be a lack of funds to support the development of back-end experiments. This process is the most time-consuming part.
③ Front-end: Publishing/communication/application of copyrighted scientific research results, which is also the part of scientific research activities that the public is exposed to. The output of the front-end, whether it is papers related to theory and experiment, or technical patents, may bring direct or indirect benefits to society and researchers. This process is the part that can earn the most fame and fortune.
The above traditional centralized scientific research method is guided by the National Natural Science Foundation (NSF). Researchers generally write fund applications at the beginning of the year and annual assessment reports or project completion reports at the end of the year. They spend several months dealing with applications or assessments (mid-term). The review committee responsible for reviewing fund applications and project completion is composed of researchers with a certain reputation in the same field, that is, the best in the industry. The approval rate of fund applications is very low. The success rate of NSF applications in China is only about 20% (2021), and the success rate of NSF applications in the United States is 28% (2022). Therefore, for young scholars, "winning the book (i.e., fund)" is as happy as Fan Jin winning the imperial examination.
Source: https://fund.cingta.com/.
In order to pass the review smoothly, the usual practice of researchers when applying for funds is to have the chicken before the egg, that is, to have resources (backend) first before applying for funds. For example, when applying, a part of the application has actually been completed, so the application written will appear sophisticated and mature. In this way, the review experts will believe that the funds will not be wasted and there will definitely be outputs. This ultimately leads to two not-so-optimistic trends: the first is a decline in the risk preference of scientific research, conservative exploration directions, and blind pursuit of hot spots, with no one studying niche or unconventional directions; the second is the Matthew effect, where funds are gradually concentrated on academic authorities (commonly known as academic cliques), and it is difficult for fledgling or unknown researchers to get sufficient funds, and academic authorities are both athletes and referees in fund allocation.
Beheading is counted as military merit, many people are greedy and take advantage of it
In the final assessment of centralized scientific research projects, the academic review committee mainly examines the papers or patents that have been published in academic journals (generally, technical patents are also accompanied by articles for introduction or promotion). Therefore, for scientific researchers, publishing papers has become a rigid need. Problems with the reproduction of experimental results (others cannot repeat the original author's experimental results based on the article) and academic fraud are emerging in an endless stream. This is because some scientific researchers will whitewash the results and cover up defects in order to publish papers as quickly as possible. The evaluation of a researcher's reputation is also based on published papers, such as the number of citations of the paper.
Source: https://www.aminer.cn/
The process of publishing a paper can be as tortuous as the experiment itself. After the painstaking experiment produces results, researchers organize the data into a draft paper, and then spend several months or even more than a year to publish the results in a journal (semi-monthly or monthly) for the public to see. The reason for such a long time cost is that there may be errors in the draft paper that the author has not considered, which requires peer review in the field, that is, reviewers to make suggestions and make revisions.
The platforms for publishing the results of natural science research are mainly publishers under the Elsevier and Springer groups. Considering that few people would pick up an academic journal while boarding a plane or waiting for a bus to read those unfamiliar professional terms and difficult academic writing styles (Heavy Academic Style), the subscription volume of academic journals is very small. In order to make a profit, publishers need to charge authors a certain fee.
If the author does not pay, the reader has to pay a certain fee to subscribe, usually each article costs tens of dollars or euros to obtain the PDF electronic version of the article (CNKI earns more in RMB). In response to the Open Access movement, many journals need to charge open source fees to allow readers to obtain electronic versions for free through the Internet. For example, the famous journal Nature requires authors to pay more than $10,000, and Nature Communications requires authors to pay more than $5,000.
We have to mention the Sci-Hub website here. The founder, Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan, used hacking techniques and a vulnerability in the database where the papers were stored to steal a large number of papers from various publishers and make them all public, so that everyone can search and download them for free. After this battle, Elbakyan became famous all over the world. The journal Nature listed Elbakyan as one of the top ten scientific figures of 2016. Elbakyan was also sued by the publisher for this. However, the lawsuit was dropped. In addition to the fact that the US courts could not prosecute Elbakyan who was hiding in Russia, the deeper reasons are also easy to understand:
> Those who steal fire from heaven to illuminate the human world will be forgiven by God.
Regardless of whether an article is open access or not, the author does not receive any royalties, and the reviewers do not receive any compensation. Reviewers are free labor during the months of paper review, because reviewers are usually specially invited by the editor of the journal (who are usually experts in the field), and are a symbol of reputation in the academic circle. If peers are interested in the research in the paper, they generally will not refuse the review invitation. You can refer to Li Bai's reaction when he saw Cui Hao's "Yellow Crane Tower" poem. The number of reviewers is generally 2-5. Sometimes the author will recommend a few "favorite" reviewers, but the editor may not consider the experts in the same field recommended by the author, but will look for experts who match the research field of the paper to review it separately. This match is often unsatisfactory, and bias and poor communication are common problems in the review process.
Of the people, by the people, for the people
In summary, with funding being cut day by day (due to reduced government revenue and environmental reasons), there is a lot of redundancy and internal friction in the middle and front-end processes of centralized scientific research, and even a waste of researchers’ lives. In response to the above-mentioned shortcomings of the middle and front ends, the DeSci movement aims to use blockchain-based “Web3” technology to encourage researchers to conduct open and transparent research, solve the pain points and bottlenecks of centralized scientific research, and expand and disseminate human shared knowledge[4].
The DeSci movement is part of the citizen science and open science movements. Under the premise of protecting privacy and legal activities, it can even be applied to the back-end of scientific research, that is, the experimental part. In May 2021, the journal Nature published an article titled "Smartphone science: apps test and track infectious diseases", which mentioned that smartphones are gradually playing an important role in modern scientific research, such as mobilizing community volunteers to use mobile phone camera functions and App applications to track diseases caused by mosquitoes[5] and mark people infected with the new coronavirus[6]. Researchers used the camera function of their mobile phones to produce experimental results similar to those of a $50,000 fluorescence microscope, but the cost was less than $40[7]. Both Web2 and Web3 technologies shine in the DeSci movement.
The community volunteers who initiate scientific research activities are actually decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). In the DeSci movement, there should be the spirit of citizen science/open science and DAO: open data, open source results, transparent process, public support, cost sharing, and benefit sharing. The infrastructure that supports these DAO spirits is Web3 technology.
Source: https://www.azquotes.com/
2. What are the technical means adopted by the DeSci movement?
The DeSci movement mainly relies on Web 3.0 based on Ethereum (ETH). For example:
① Tokenization of digital assets. There are two modes. The first one is relatively simple, which is to convert scientific research results into non-fungible tokens (NFTs), through which researchers can directly obtain economic benefits. For example, the first NFT made from a scientific manuscript was sold at a high price of 13 ETH (about 24,000 US dollars) on the OpenSea website [8]. However, this high price may not be the norm, and NFT income is not enough to cover scientific research expenses.
The second method is more complicated and is similar to real estate securitization. It crowdfunds research funds through DAO. DAO issues tokens based on community voting and multi-signature review by the treasury. Members who own DAO tokens jointly own the copyright of research results. For example, VitaDAO[9] issues the token VITA to fund the research and development of rare diseases that lack funding or have no one researching them.
② Efficient peer-to-peer data storage (IPFS) technology. The reason why researchers publish their results on centralized platforms and may have to pay a certain fee is that they need to store data and results on servers and provide a web portal for others to access and share. IPFS is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol that converts files into blocks encrypted with hash values. A slight difference of one byte in the file content will result in a different hash value for its block[10]. These blocks are scattered across various network nodes and can be retrieved from the Web2 portal. When indexing a file, the IPFS protocol downloads the blocks associated with the file from different nodes.
③ Using decentralized finance (DeFi) technology, a scientific research incentive system is set up through on-chain verification methods such as timestamps and proof of work. For example, the Ants-Review project transfers the peer review process to the chain. Authors publish drafts of scientific research results anonymously on the Ethereum chain and submit review tasks and rewards. Reviewers upload their comments and suggestions to the Ethereum chain. The entire community evaluates the peer review results and pays proportionally based on the quality of their evaluation [11]. In addition, there are also peer review processes that are not based on token incentives. For example, the reputation system and IPFS are used to transfer the review process to the chain. Here, for reviewers, the incentive mechanism is the community's constantly updated reputation score for reviewers on the chain instead of tokens [12]. IPFS is used to store and share different versions of papers from the first draft to the final publication, as well as peer review reports throughout the process.
The application of reputation system in Web2 is not unfamiliar, for example, using the information interaction characteristics of the Internet to quantify the reputation of merchants in the process of serving customers. Many centralized e-commerce platforms, such as Dianping, Taobao, Amazon, etc., will set a constantly updated rating for merchants. Consumers rate from different perspectives, such as product quality, logistics delivery speed, etc. However, these ratings have false five-star reviews, that is, the "score brushing" phenomenon, and a complete industrial chain has been formed. Merchants will also use coupons and other means to induce customers to give good reviews. Not only are there frauds in ratings, but merchants will also falsify sales, transaction orders, and transaction amounts.
When Web3 technology is applied to the reputation system, timestamp verification, on-chain recording of professional achievements, and non-saleable and non-transferable NFTs make it very costly to falsify these ratings. The signature and authorization of on-chain wallets also reduce the risk of personal data leakage. In June 2022, the MetisDAO Foundation announced the launch of the Web3-based Reputation Power System [13]. Reputation power refers to portable and composable ratings obtained through on-chain achievements. Reputation power is obtained by participating in and contributing to DAO governance by performing operations such as deploying smart contracts, outputting content, minting NFTs, and voting.
A sound reputation system and a corresponding DAO governance system are crucial to the successful achievement of the ideal goal of DeSci. Because personal reputation plays the role of a trust certificate in the use of funds raised by DAO, it may directly determine voting rights and review rights. Therefore, the DeSci movement based on Web3 technology will inevitably encounter a series of trust issues. There are many scientists who are willing to break their heads for truth or fame and fortune. Scientific research is not about treating people to a meal and being friendly.
> Of course, it’s not a movie, everyone is Sister Wang’s return.
Source: Movie "Detective Chinatown"
3. What areas does the DeSci movement fail to cover?
Some of the problems that the DeSci movement aims to solve may not be problems in themselves. Just like the chef Fan in the sketch "Selling Crutch":
> How did I become lame while walking? How did I go from riding a bicycle to using crutches?
Unite the united front and make more friends
After entering the 21st century, the world's political and economic situation has advanced by leaps and bounds. For example, China's accession to the WTO and the United States' quantitative easing have directly led to a blowout in scientific research projects and funding. The output of funding projects and papers (and the export of international students) in China and the United States has increased by orders of magnitude. When a small problem grows by an order of magnitude, it will become a major problem that cannot be ignored, seriously affecting the survival and development of the academic community. In order to solve the chronic diseases and drawbacks mentioned above, centralized bureaucratic organizations must also rise to a higher dimension, otherwise they will not be able to cope with the ever-changing challenges.
As a result, the reformists in the academic community launched a new round of open science movement, mainly including open access to papers, open data and open source software. The open science of the new century is mainly based on the open source Web2 centralized platform. For example, researchers can host their paper drafts as preprints on the ArXiv website, which runs on the server of Cornell University in the United States.
The advantage of preprinting is that it does not need to go through the time-consuming and laborious peer review process, and can directly publish research results, spreading scientific discoveries at the fastest speed, which has played a key role in the outbreak of the new coronavirus epidemic. Of course, the hidden benefit is that researchers can be the first to claim sovereignty over new discoveries, just like the colonists who rushed to plant flags in the Age of Exploration.
Source: Movie "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides"
Open source code, software, and data can be hosted on websites such as GitHub. Although document sharing and version control are the areas that benefit the most from blockchain technology, GitHub still has incomparable advantages in teamwork in writing code, documents, retaining different versions, and sharing results. In particular, the interface is very friendly to programmers, and the code can be read directly through the web page. If a package or document is on GitHub and thousands of people give it a star rating, then the original author has a very high reputation and proof of professional ability.
Source: https://github.com/guofei9987
Open source operating systems include Linux, Unix, etc., and open source software includes Open Office, Blender, QGIS, etc. In Google's open source programmer Colab, you can compile code directly on the web page without installing programming software, and save the code and documents on the cloud drive.
Therefore, in the past decade or so, open science itself has gained the participation of a large number of people in the academic community. As a revolutionary party, the DeSci movement needs to prove that its solutions are much stronger than the reformists within the centralized bureaucratic organization. Researchers who have participated in the open science wave will be the main force of the DeSci revolutionary movement in the future, but the DeSci movement does not seem to consider how to absorb these people to participate.
Your chain, my chain, are everyone's chain
Another issue is the revolutionary agenda of the DeSci movement - blockchain itself.
Although the blockchain technology represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum uses a distributed ledger with a timestamp to represent the transfer of value, the theory and technical means began after Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin in 2009, but the idea has been popular in natural science for hundreds of years. Sorting out the citation relationship between documents, just like Bitcoin's transaction records can be traced back to the genesis block, can be completely traced back to the original paper.
The journal Nature compiled 88,000 papers published in the journal from 1900 to 2017. These papers contain nearly 700 million citation relationships. If other papers cite a paper, then a connection is created between them, as shown in the following figure. In the figure, the dots represent papers, the colors represent disciplines, and the size of the dots represents the number of citations[14]. These more than 80,000 papers are just a drop in the ocean of scientific literature. The literature citation system of natural sciences that has lasted for hundreds of years is a network of multiple blockchains interwoven with timestamps and value transfer records.
Although anonymity is the strength of blockchain, researchers attach great importance to works with real names. Basic disciplines such as mathematical physics are research fields with a strong sense of personal heroism, and no one can resist the ultimate temptation of naming a theorem after themselves. For example, the famous "L'Hôpital's Rule" was the result of the nobleman L'Hôpital (Marquis) giving the genius mathematician John Bernoulli 300 livres (equivalent to 136 kilograms of silver) every year to fund his research in exchange for the right to name this major mathematical research result, thus going down in history.
Therefore, the biggest reviewer and the first reviewer of a paper is always the author himself. Although the application of the DeSci movement in peer review is worth promoting, is there any need for the peer review system itself to continue to exist?
Nowadays, everyone can publish their ideas on blogs and video sites, and the way to communicate and spread knowledge is instant and interactive. With open data and transparent results, there should be no articles that are rejected for publication. It should not be just a few people who make suggestions for revisions to a paper, but everyone who can see the paper, and the author has the greatest right to execute the paper and modify the content of the article according to the suggestions. The application of the DeSci movement in peer review is a solution to redundant market needs.
Source: https://cryptohayes.medium.com/
More haste, less speed
Sometimes, slow is good, slow is valuable. The efficiency brought by Web3 technology is not always the optimal solution. There are scientific research results that take ten years to sharpen a sword. Even if DeSci can reduce the direct cost of scientific research to zero one day in the future, communication will always be the biggest cost. The acquisition of scientific knowledge is very simple and the cost is very low, but the cost of digestion and absorption is very high. The human brain is more complex and difficult to understand than the universe. Einstein and the Copenhagen School argued for 30 years. The collision of the universe of thought directly led to the nuclear explosion-like development of physics theory. The straight line is the shortest distance, but the tortuous route is more valuable.
Source: https://www.agu.org/
Avoiding past mistakes
Currently, a number of DAO funds that support scientific research have emerged in the DeSci movement, such as the OceanDAO Foundation that supports oceanographic research[15], the Molecule Foundation that supports biomedical research[16], and the VitaDAO Foundation[9]. Their operating model is to crowdfund through DAOs, but none of them has gotten rid of the process of "submitting an application - approving the project - obtaining funding". Apart from saving time, there has been no essential change in the model. Since this model is too similar to the epic of traditional centralized scientific research, the author will not list the reasoning and proof, but simply give a conclusion here:
> As long as there is approval, there will be centralization.
4. What are the possible future directions for the DeSci movement?
Before you win, you must first consider your defeat
During the Warring States Period, although most of the 3,000 retainers kept by Mengchangjun were just eating and drinking for free, some of them were able to play a decisive role in life-and-death moments, such as Feng Xuan, a peerless national talent, as well as the likes of Ji Ming and Gou Dao.
Just as Christianity never lacks donations and the monks in temples always have a lot of money, scientific research is also a means to maintain the stability of governance and social harmony. It is both utilitarian and ornamental. 90% of academic achievements are repetitive and redundant research, which is neither original nor has theoretical or application value. However, 10% of high-level scientific research can get a lot of funding without the DeSci movement.
From the perspective of the design of the top structure of society, scientific research is an activity with a high failure rate. Although the academic community has a strict hierarchy, it also has a high tolerance for failed research.
Even in the research institutes or R&D centers within some commercial companies, the research cycle of a technology may be long and tortuous. For example, it took Huawei 10 years to make a breakthrough in 5G algorithms by hiring highly paid foreign engineers; the R&D cycle of new drugs of some biopharmaceutical companies can be more than 20 years; most of the funds of the three major artificial intelligence research centers of Google, Microsoft, and Baidu have also been wasted, but the academic contribution of Google Artificial Intelligence Research Institute is comparable to that of the academic world in the ivory tower.
In the current DeSci movement, there is no problem with tolerance for failure. In Huawei, Ren Zhengfei can support it with his word, even if it fails many times, but in the voting of the DAO organization, there may be a phenomenon of "collective dementia". This may be an area where the DeSci movement needs to be improved in the future.
Edge Breakthrough
If a revolutionary movement succeeds, it will surely break through from the margins, that is, "surround the city with the countryside." In niche areas that are not funded by the government or companies and have little oil and water, the DeSci movement may shine.
In the applied sciences, the fields with a high degree of commercialization, such as computer information technology, have the highest degree of open source, so it is relatively easy to obtain data and code (some core codes are not open source due to profit issues). Although IPFS technology can store and share data in a decentralized manner, in some experimental fields, the data itself is very valuable, and it often takes a huge amount of manpower and material resources to obtain it, and there are certain technical barriers, so the possibility of disclosure is very small. Moreover, sometimes the communication and sharing of information between scientific researchers will be restricted by the country's political power. Scientific knowledge can be made public for free, but modern scientific research is based on technology, which has barriers and moats. There are many technical patents or achievements that cannot be opened.
DeSci should focus on empowering researchers rather than just focusing on the blockchain tool itself. Blockchain technology is not well known to researchers, and many people don’t even know how to use ETH wallets. During the 1927 Revolution, the Northern Expedition was successful, partly because Hanyang rifles were widely equipped with the Northern Expedition Army. Of course, the leaders of the Northern Expedition were eventually bought by the chaebol. The conservatism and weakness of researchers themselves may also limit the development and growth of the DeSci movement. In addition, the current encrypted wallets are almost irrecoverable after being lost. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the infrastructure construction of wallet security.
"If you don't encounter the tangled roots, how can you distinguish the sharp weapon?"
The overall funding amount of the DeSci movement may eventually account for a small proportion, but as an alternative to traditional scientific research, DeSci is expected to become Feng Xuan's "three burrows for the cunning rabbit", gaining maximum support for scientific research activities.
When natural science was first born, it was funded by the church, the king, or the nobility, and it has never been independent and decentralized. The intricate scientific research traditions and interest groups stand in the way of the universal values of Web3. I hope that these historical inertias can be broken by the DeSci movement.
If not, there is no regret, as history will continue to select the next challenger to join the ring.
