A teaser on Decentralized Science (DeSci)

Knowledge should be free, and open for everyone. The great Aaron Swartz lived and died with this philosophy.

Aaron Swartz was a computer whizz kid who at the age of 14 co-authored RSS version 1.0 and joined a working group at the World Wide Web Consortium to help develop common data formats used on the World Wide Web. He is considered to be a co-founder of Reddit when his company Infogami merged with Reddit. He developed the Web.py framework. There are numerous projects Swartz was involved in and even to this day, his ideas are giving way to new fields in computer science. For example, the blockchain name systems are based on a blog written by Swartz.

Why was Aaron Swartz's life tragically cut short? In 2011, he was accused of using an MIT computer system to download a large number of academic articles from the JSTOR archive. While JSTOR chose not to press charges and even requested the government to refrain from prosecuting, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with 13 felony counts. Despite his attempts to reach a settlement, prosecutors insisted on jail time and required him to plead guilty to felony offenses, rejecting alternatives.

Swartz disagreed with the idea that knowledge is not free and open. This led to him taking his own life at the age of 26 in January 2013. He was posthumously awarded the American Library Association’s James Madison Award for being an outspoken advocate for public participation in government and unrestricted access to peer-reviewed scholarly articles.

Swartz’s death led to many reforms making way to open access but still, we are far from making knowledge open.

Lack of open access to academic research is just a small part of the structural issues in academia - inequality in research funding, intellectual property issues, privacy issues, and lack of transparency to name a few. Most of these issues arise from centralized gatekeeping by a few dominant publishing groups.

Decentralized Science or DeSci aims to solve these problems.

Okay, before we discuss DeSci in detail (probably in the next article), let us look a little bit deeper into the problems DeSci aims to solve.

The basic idea of DeSci is removing the centralized control in scientific research and replacing it with blockchain-based systems.

For example, traditional research funding often favors well-established institutions or mainstream topics, sidelining innovative or niche projects. DeSci employs DAOs and token-based systems to enable broader participation in decision-making and funding allocation.

As mentioned earlier in this article, another issue with traditional research systems is closed knowledge by keeping research outputs locked behind paywalls. DeSci leverages blockchain and decentralized storage to promote open-access models, ensuring that scientific data and findings are freely available to all.

In the traditional system, researchers frequently lose control over their intellectual property to institutions or publishers. DeSci introduces mechanisms like IP-NFTs to allow scientists to tokenize and retain ownership of their work.?

Apart from that, DeSci ensures verifiable, tamper-proof research records via blockchain, fostering reproducibility and trust. DeSci leverages cryptographic techniques and decentralized storage to enhance data privacy while enabling secure sharing for research.

Let us end this article with a few examples of DeSci platforms. We will just touch upon them and in the next articles will go deeper.

Let us start with VitalDAO. Focused on longevity research, VitaDAO pools resources and democratizes intellectual property using blockchain.?

Now, Molecule is another platform that tokenizes research projects through IP-NFTs (intellectual property non-fungible tokens), allowing scientists to secure decentralized funding. It acts as a hub connecting researchers with funders and providing infrastructure for IP management.

AthenaDAO specializes in women's health research and funds initiatives addressing issues like ovarian aging.

GenomesDAO enables individuals to control their genomic data via blockchain-based DNA Vaults. This platform balances privacy and data sharing for research purposes, offering a decentralized model for genomic studies.