Original Author: Doctor Strange
Original editor: Vincero, YL, CloudY, Sihan
Where does the money come from? Where does the money go? The source and use of funds are always the primary issues of scientific research.
After the great plague in the 14th century in Europe, the story of God preached by religious organizations was no longer enough to heal the wounds of the world and answer the publics doubts about the real world. As a result, church organizations such as Christianity and Catholicism began to fund some of their believers to conduct research in astrophysics, biomedicine, and chemistry, and became natural philosophers. The names of some believers are still shining in the annals of history, such as Newton, Galileo, Copernicus and so on.
After the natural philosophy was superior to the blue and parted ways with religion, the kings and nobles replaced the church as scientists (and equally important craftsmen, craftsmen, etc. artist)s biggest golden master. Of course, the elite class was not the only sponsor of scientific research activities. After the Renaissance, the political culture and scientific awareness of the majority of citizens were enlightened, and they actively participated in scientific research activities, so that science was no longer the exclusive hobby of the aristocratic elite. Citizen Science (Citizen Science) and Open Science (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 (academic community) in the ivory tower would eventually turn back into an organization with the most religious creed. The academic world has gradually evolved a hierarchical academic authority that is equivalent to the power of the Godfather and Pope, and funding is centered on these authorities.
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The soldiers and horses have not moved, the money and food go first
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Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/
Following the product operation logic of the Internet industry, modern scientific research activities can be divided into three major components, and the manpower and material resources consumed by each part are very different:
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 a supercomputer with energy consumption comparable to that of mining is placed), and the value of instruments in a laboratory can reach tens of millions of yuan (especially for experimental physics and Chemistry and other disciplines based on instrument operation). This process is the most expensive part.
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Source: https://www.58pic.com/
③ Front end: Publication/communication/application of scientific research results with copyright, which is also the part where the public usually comes into contact with scientific research activities under the exposure light. Front-end output, whether it is papers related to theory and experiments, or technical patents, may bring direct or indirect benefits to society and researchers. The process is the most fame-earning part.
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Source: https://fund.cingta.com/.
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Beheading counts military merits, and there are many greedy and impostors.
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Source: https://www.aminer.cn/
The tortuousness of the process of publishing a paper may be comparable to that of the experiment itself. After the results of painstaking experiments, researchers organize the data into a draft paper, and then spend several months or even more than a year to publish the results in journals (semi-monthly or monthly) and make them public. The reason why it takes such a large time cost is that there may be errors in the draft paper that the author failed to consider, which requires peer review in this field, that is, the reviewers make suggestions and make revisions.
The platforms for the publication of research results in natural sciences are mainly the publishing houses under Elsevier and Springer Group. Considering that it is true that very few people pick up an academic journal when boarding a plane or waiting for a bus, to read those unfamiliar technical terms and heavy academic style (Heavy Academic Style), so the order quantity of academic journals is very small, In order to make a profit, the publishing house needs to charge the author a certain fee.
If the author does not pay the fee, 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 RMB). In response to the Open Access (Open Access) movement, allowing readers to obtain electronic versions for free through the Internet, many journals need to charge open source fees. thousands of dollars.
I have to mention the Sci-Hub website here. The founder, Alexandra Asanovna Erbakin, used hacking technology to exploit the database loopholes in the storage of papers to steal a large number of papers from various publishing houses, and made them all public, and everyone can retrieve and download them for free. After this battle, Elbakin became famous all over the world. The journal Nature listed Elbakin as one of the top ten scientific figures of 2016. Elbakyan was also sued by the publisher for this. However, the lawsuit is nothing, except that the courts in the United States cannot pursue Elbakin who is hiding in Russia, and the deeper reasons are easy to understand:
>Those who steal the sky and shine on the world will be forgiven by God.
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Of the people, by the people, for the people
To sum up, in the context of increasingly reduced funding (reduced government revenue and environmental protection), there are a lot of redundancy and internal friction in the mid-end and front-end processes of centralized scientific research, and even waste the lives of researchers. Aiming at the disadvantages of the mid-end and front-end mentioned above, the DeSci movement aims to utilize blockchain-based"Web3 "Technology to motivate scientific researchers to conduct open and transparent research, solve the pain points and bottlenecks of centralized scientific research, and expand and spread 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 entitled Smartphone science: apps test and track infectious diseases, mentioning that smartphones are gradually playing an important role in modern scientific research, for example, by mobilizing community volunteers to use mobile phones The shooting function and App application are used to track the diseases caused by mosquitoes[5], mark people infected with the new coronavirus[6], etc. Researchers used the camera function of mobile phones to produce experimental results similar to those of a $50,000 fluorescence microscope, at a cost of less than $40 [7]. Both Web2 and Web3 technologies are making a splash in the DeSci movement.
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Source: https://www.azquotes.com/
2. What are the technical means adopted by the DeSci movement?
The DeSci movement relies primarily on Web 3.0 based on the Ethereum (ETH) chain. For example:
① Tokenization of digital assets. There are two models. The first method is relatively simple. It converts scientific research results into non-fungible tokens (Non-Fungible Token, NFT), through which researchers can directly obtain economic benefits. For example, the NFT produced by the first scientific research manuscript was sold at a high price of 13 ETH (about 24,000 US dollars) on the OpenSea website [8]. However, this kind of high selling price may not be the norm, and NFT income is not enough to cover scientific research expenditures.
The second method is more complicated, similar to real estate securitization. Through DAO crowdfunding for scientific research funds, DAO issues tokens based on community votes and treasury multi-signature review. Members who own DAO tokens jointly own the copyright of research results, such as VitaDAO [9], through the issuance of the token VITA, funding is given to the research and development of rare diseases that lack funds or have no one to study.
② Efficient peer-to-peer data storage (IPFS) technology. The reason why researchers have to publish their results on a centralized platform and may need to pay a certain fee is because the data and results are stored on the server and hosted on the server, and the platform provides a web portal for others to obtain and share. IPFS is a point-to-point hypermedia protocol that converts files into blocks encrypted with hash values. A slight difference in a byte of file content will result in a different block hash value [10]. These blocks are distributed across various network nodes and can be retrieved from Web2 portals. When indexing a file, the IPFS protocol downloads the blocks associated with the file from different nodes.
③ Use decentralized finance (DeFi) technology to set up a scientific research incentive system through on-chain verification methods such as time stamps and proof-of-work. For example, the Ants-Review project transfers the peer review process to the chain, and the author publishes the draft scientific research results anonymously on the Ethereum chain, and submits review tasks and bounties. Reviewers upload comments and suggestions to the Ethereum chain, and the entire community evaluates peer review results and pays proportionally according to the quality of their evaluation [11]. In addition, there are also peer review processes that are not based on token incentives, such as using the reputation system (Reputation System) and IPFS to transfer the review process to the chain. For reviewers, the incentive mechanism is that the community Score reviewers with constantly updated reputations 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, such as 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 products from different perspectives, such as product quality, logistics delivery speed, etc. However, there are false five-star praises in these ratings, that is, the phenomenon of scoring points, and a complete industrial chain has been formed, and merchants will also use coupons and other means to induce customers to give praise. Not only do they falsify ratings, but merchants also falsify sales, transaction orders, and turnover.
When Web3 technology is applied to the reputation system, time stamp verification, on-chain recording of professional achievements, non-saleable and transferable NFT and other means make these score falsifications very costly, and the signature and authorization of the on-chain wallet also reduces personal data leakage. risks of. In June 2022, the MetisDAO Foundation announced the launch of the Web3-based Reputation Power System [13]. Reputation Power is a portable and composable score earned through on-chain achievements. By performing operations such as deploying smart contracts, outputting content, casting NFT, voting, etc., participate in and contribute to DAO governance and gain reputation.
A sound reputation system and corresponding DAO governance system are crucial to the successful realization of DeScis ideal goal. Because personal reputation plays the role of 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 break their heads for truth or fame and fortune. Scientific research is not a treat for dinner, with a kind face.
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3. What are the areas not covered by the DeSci movement?
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Unite the united front and make many friends.
After entering the 21st century, the worlds political and economic situation has advanced by leaps and bounds. For example, Chinas entry into the WTO and the United States quantitative easing have directly led to the blowout development of scientific research projects and funding. The output of funded projects and papers (as well as the output of overseas students) in China and the United States has shown an order of magnitude growth. When a small problem increases by an order of magnitude, it will become a big problem that cannot be ignored, seriously affecting the survival and development of academia. In order to solve the chronic diseases and disadvantages mentioned above, the centralized bureaucratic organization must also rise to another dimension, otherwise it will not be able to cope with the ever-changing challenges.
As a result, reformists in the academic community launched a new round of open science movement climax, mainly including open access to papers, open data and open source software movements. Open science in the new century is mainly based on the open source Web2 centralized platform. For example, researchers can host their draft papers as preprints on the ArXiv website, which runs on the servers of Cornell University in the United States.
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Source: Movie Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
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Source: https://github.com/guofei9987
Open source operating systems include Linux, Unix, etc., and open source software include Open Office, Blender, QGIS, etc. In Googles 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.
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Your chain, my chain, everyones chain
Another issue is the revolutionary platform of the DeSci movement — the blockchain itself.
Although the blockchain technology represented by Bitcoin and Ethereum uses a time-stamped distributed ledger to represent the transfer of value, the theory and technical means began after Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin in 2009, but the idea has long been in nature. Science has been around for hundreds of years. Sorting out the citation relationship between documents, just like the transaction records of Bitcoin can be traced back to the genesis block, can be traced back to the original paper.
The journal Nature sorted out 88,000 papers published by the journal since 1900-2017. These documents contain nearly 700 million citation relationships. If other papers cite a certain paper, they will be connected. , as shown in the figure below, the dots in the figure represent papers, the colors represent disciplines, and the size of dots represents the number of citations [14]. These more than 80,000 papers are just a drop in the ocean of scientific literature. The hundreds of years of natural science literature citation system is a network of multiple blockchains interwoven with time stamps and value transfer records.
Although anonymity is the strength of the blockchain, researchers attach great importance to works with real names imprinted. Basic subjects such as mathematical physics are scientific research fields with strong personal heroism, and no one can refuse the ultimate temptation of naming theorems after their own names. For example, the famous LHopidas Law, that is, the nobleman LHopida (Marquis), gave genius mathematician John Bernoulli 300 livres (equivalent to 136 kilograms of silver) to subsidize his research every year, in exchange for this important The right to name the results of mathematical research, thus going down in history.
Therefore, the biggest reviewer and the first reviewer of a paper is always the signed author himself. Although the application of the DeSci movement in peer review is worth promoting, is it still necessary for the peer review system itself to continue to exist?
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Source: https://cryptohayes.medium.com/
Haste makes waste
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avoid repeating the same mistakes
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Not counting victory, counting defeat first
During the Warring States period, although most of the 3,000 followers kept by Lord Mengchang were mixed food and drink, some of them could indeed play a decisive role at critical moments, such as Feng Xuan, the unparalleled scholar of the country, as well as cock crowing and dog robbers.
Just like Christianity will not lack donations, and the monastery’s monks will always have incense and money in their pockets, scientific research is also one of the means to maintain ruling stability and social harmony, which is both utilitarian and ornamental. 90% of academic achievements are repetitive and redundant research, which are neither original nor have theoretical or application value. The 10% of high-level scientific research does not need to be heavily funded through the DeSci movement.
From the perspective of the design of the top-level structure of society, scientific research activities are activities with a high failure rate. Although the academic community is strictly hierarchical, it also has a high tolerance for failed research.
Even in research institutes or RD centers within some commercial companies, the cycle of researching a technology may be tortuous and long. For example, foreign engineers hired by Huawei with high salaries took 10 years to make breakthroughs in 5G algorithms; the development cycle of new drugs for some biopharmaceutical companies can reach more than 20 years; Some of the funds have also been in vain, but the academic contribution of the Google Artificial Intelligence Research Institute is already comparable to the academic circles in the ivory tower.
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edge breakthrough
If the revolutionary movement can succeed, it must break through from the edge, that is, surround the city with the countryside. The DeSci movement could thrive in niche, unfunded, unfunded fields.
In fields with a high degree of commercialization in applied sciences, such as computer information technology, the degree of open source is the highest, so it is relatively easy to obtain data and codes (some core codes are not open sourced 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 precious, and it is often obtained through a huge expenditure of manpower and material resources, and there are certain technical thresholds. Very unlikely. Whats more, sometimes the exchange and sharing of information among scientific researchers will be restricted by the political power of the country. Scientific knowledge can be freely disclosed, but modern scientific research is based on technology, and there are thresholds and moats. There are many technical patents or achievements that cannot be disclosed.
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If you dont encounter intertwined roots, why dont you use a sharp weapon?
The overall funding amount of the DeSci movement may eventually account for a relatively small proportion, but as an alternative to traditional scientific research, DeSci is expected to become Feng Xuans three caves for cunning rabbits and strive for the greatest degree of support for scientific research activities.
At the beginning of its birth, natural science was funded by churches, kings or nobles, and it has never been independent and decentralized. The intricate scientific research tradition and interest groups lie in front of the universal values of Web3. Hopefully these historical inertias will be broken by the DeSci movement.
If not, there is no regret, history will continue to select the next challenger to enter the ring.
Source：
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[3] Monserrate S G. The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage[J], 2022.
[4] Hamburg S. Call to join the decentralized science movement[J]. Nature, 2021, 600(7888): 221-221.
[5] Ravindran S. Smartphone science: apps test and track infectious diseases[J]. Nature, 2021, 593(7858): 302-303.
[6] Varsavsky T, Graham M S, Canas L S, et al. Detecting COVID-19 infection hotspots in England using large-scale self-reported data from a mobile application: a prospective, observational study[J]. The Lancet Public Health, 2021, 6(1): e21-e29.
[7] Chung S, Breshears L E, Gonzales A, et al. Norovirus detection in water samples at the level of single virus copies per microliter using a smartphone-based fluorescence microscope[J]. Nature Protocols, 2021, 16(3): 1452-1475.
[8] Open Source Science Manuscript 1[EB/OL]. https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c248420045cb7b5e/41443491289334730858714141368268395642829177615924976808738423867555824271361.
[9] VitaDAO: We are democratising longevity[EB/OL]. https://www.vitadao.com/.
[10] Chen Y, Li H, Li K, et al. An improved P2P file system scheme based on IPFS and Blockchain[C], 2017: 2652-2657.
[11] Trovò B, Massari N. Ants-Review: A Privacy-Oriented Protocol for Incentivized Open Peer Reviews on Ethereum[C]. Euro-Par 2020: Parallel Processing Workshops, 2021: 18-29.
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[13] The Future is Here: Matrix Reputation Power[EB/OL]. https://metisdao.medium.com/the-future-is-here-matrix-reputation-power-ccd877158573.
[14] Gates A J, Ke Q, Varol O, et al. Nature’s reach: narrow work has broad impact. Nature Publishing Group, 2019.
[15] OceanDAO Grants[EB/OL]. https://oceanprotocol.com/dao.
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