Decentralized science is key to fixing academic research

Academia and science are both in the throes of a crisis, marked by several inefficiencies directly impacting our scientific prowess and research capabilities. The subject of stagnation within universities and academic institutions is taboo, and there is no place in this system for dissenting intellectuals who challenge the status quo or the quality of scientific research.

Decentralized science (DeSci) aims to disrupt these systems for good reason. DeSci paired with blockchain technology has the potential to upend existing funding schemes and enhance collaboration between stakeholders in scientific endeavors.

Access to scientific reports and research is a highly contentious issue. In the digital age, the scientific publishing industry has created a fortified oligarchy that threatens the integrity of scientific innovation. The sector benefits from publicly funded research to achieve more significant profit margins than Google, Amazon or Apple. Instead of advancing science, these publishers conceal government-funded research behind locked paywalls and charge high subscription fees for access.

Defined by the mantra “publish or perish,” scientists have become entangled in a game where their career prospects depend more on the publication of their work in prestigious journals than the merits of the work itself — a self-referential hierarchy that is carefully maintained by publishers to drive revenue. To gain this acceptance, scientists tend to publish the most eye-catching and unexpected results, feeding into what has been called the “reproducibility crisis in science.”

In a 2016 survey conducted by Nature, 70% of researchers noted that they have tried and failed to reproduce their colleagues’ experiments. This inability to reproduce experiments threatens the foundation and accuracy of scientific literature. This flawed system leads to an environment that fosters exclusivity and discourages data sharing among the scientific community, directly impacting the quality and caliber of the research produced.

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From these fragilities came the birth of the open access movement, a campaign to make scientific content freely available to the public. The movement began in the early 2000s and sought to release papers from behind publishers’ paywalls. Over the past two decades, the movement has made steady progress, with a growing amount of academic…