Web 3 — Decentralized Science vs Traditional Science: A Comparative Analysis

The goal of the Decentralized Science (DeSci) movement is to establish a public infrastructure on the Web3 stack that facilitates the fair and equitable funding, creation, review, accreditation, storage, and dissemination of scientific knowledge.

DeSci strives to foster a scientific ecosystem where researchers are motivated to openly share their work and receive due credit while enabling easy access and contribution to research by anyone. DeSci upholds the principle that scientific knowledge should be widely accessible and that the research process must be transparent.

By creating a more decentralized and distributed model of scientific research, DeSci seeks to render it less vulnerable to censorship and control by central authorities. The ultimate aim of DeSci is to establish an environment that encourages the development of new and unconventional ideas by decentralizing funding, scientific tools, and communication channels.

DeSci also allows for diverse funding sources, including DAOs, quadratic donations, crowdfunding, etc., increased accessibility to data and methods, and incentives for reproducibility.

What are the differences between DeSi and TradSi?

Decentralized science can help address several key problems in science that traditional science struggles with. By using mechanisms such as quadratic donations or DAOs, DeSci allows the public to determine the distribution of funds, unlike small, closed, centralized groups in traditional science. Collaboration with peers from all over the world in dynamic teams is made possible with DeSci, whereas traditional science is limited by funding organizations and home institutions. DeSci makes funding decisions online and transparently, with new funding mechanisms being explored, unlike traditional science, where funding decisions are slow and opaque, and few funding mechanisms exist.

DeSci makes sharing laboratory services easier and more transparent by using Web3 primitives, whereas traditional science often has slow and opaque sharing of laboratory resources. With DeSci, new models for publishing can be developed that use Web3 primitives for trust, transparency, and universal access, unlike traditional science, which relies on established pathways frequently acknowledged as inefficient, biased, and exploitative.

DeSci provides incentives for peer-review work by allowing reviewers to earn tokens and reputation, unlike traditional science where peer-review work is unpaid, benefiting for-profit publishers. DeSci ensures that researchers own the intellectual property they generate and distribute it according to transparent terms, whereas in traditional science, the researcher’s home institution owns the IP generated, and access to the IP is not transparent. Finally, DeSci addresses publication bias by sharing all research, including the data from unsuccessful efforts, by having all steps on-chain, whereas traditional science researchers are more likely to share experiments that had successful results.

Publishing Work

The management of science publishing by publishing houses has resulted in several problems, such as relying on free labour from scientists, reviewers, and editors to generate papers and then charging high publishing fees. The public, who indirectly pay for the work and publication costs through taxation, cannot access the same work without paying the publisher again. This undermines the concept of scientific knowledge as a public good while generating significant profits for a small group of publishers.

Although pre-print servers like ArXiv exist as free and open-access platforms, they lack quality control, anti-sybil mechanisms, and do not generally track article-level metrics, making them unsuitable for publishing work before submission to a traditional publisher. SciHub also offers free access to published papers, but it is not legal and only becomes available after publishers have taken their payment and wrapped the work in strict copyright legislation. This leaves a significant gap for accessible science papers and data with an embedded legitimacy mechanism and incentive model. Fortunately, Web3 provides the necessary tools to build such a system.

Funding in DeSi vs TradSi.

The current standard model for funding science involves individuals or groups of scientists submitting written applications to a funding agency. A small panel of trusted individuals scores the applications and interviews candidates before awarding funds to a small fraction of applicants. This model creates bottlenecks that result in long waiting times between applying for and receiving a grant. Moreover, it is highly vulnerable to the biases, self-interests, and politics of the review panel.

Studies have demonstrated that grant review panels do a poor job of selecting high-quality proposals, as the same proposals given to different panels have vastly different outcomes. As funding has become more scarce, it has concentrated into a smaller pool of more senior researchers with more conservative projects. This effect has created a highly competitive funding landscape, entrenching perverse incentives and stifling innovation.

Web3 has the potential to disrupt this flawed funding model by experimenting with different incentive structures developed by DAOs and Web3 more broadly. Retroactive public goods funding, quadratic funding, DAO governance, and tokenized incentive structures are some of the Web3 tools that could revolutionize science funding.

How does IP work?

In traditional science, ownership of intellectual property (IP) can be a challenge, with issues such as being stuck in universities or biotechs, and difficulty in valuing it. However, Web3 offers a solution to this problem through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) which excel at ownership of digital assets such as scientific data or articles.

NFTs can establish transparent value attribution chains, allowing for rewarding researchers, governing bodies like DAOs, or even the subjects whose data is collected. IP-NFTs can also serve as keys to a decentralized data repository for research experiments, and can be utilized in financialization on-chain, including fractionalization, lending pools, and value appraisal. Additionally, they enable entities like DAOs such as VitaDAO to conduct research directly on-chain. The introduction of non-transferable “soulbound” tokens may also be important in DeSci, as they allow individuals to verify their experience and credentials linked to their Ethereum address.

Storage and access

In the realm of scientific research, Web3 technology offers new possibilities for data storage, access, and architecture. One key advantage is the potential for vastly improved accessibility, allowing anyone with the proper credentials to securely replicate and store sensitive data. This redundancy not only ensures that data is preserved in the event of catastrophic loss but also enables multiple parties to collaborate and add new information to datasets.

To achieve this, Web3 platforms provide flexible data solutions that support open science and eliminate the need for access permissions or fees. Public data solutions like IPFS, Arweave, and Filecoin are designed to be decentralized, providing reliable and censorship-resistant storage. In addition, confidential computing methods like compute-to-data offer alternative access mechanisms for sensitive data, creating Trusted Research Environments that enable researchers to work securely with data on-site.

By leveraging Web3 technology, researchers can create public goods without the restrictions of traditional data storage and access models. For example, dClimate offers universal access to climate and weather data, from weather stations to predictive climate models, using Web3 public data solutions. Ultimately, these innovations can help to create a more open and collaborative scientific community, with increased access to valuable data for researchers and the public alike.

In conclusion, DeSci is a movement that aims to revolutionize traditional science by establishing a decentralized and distributed model of scientific research.

By leveraging Web3 primitives, DeSci strives to foster a scientific ecosystem that enables open access to scientific knowledge, fosters collaboration, and provides incentives for reproducibility and peer review.

DeSci addresses several key issues in traditional science, such as the concentration of funding, bias in peer review, and the lack of transparency in IP ownership. By providing funding mechanisms, incentivizing reproducibility and peer review, and leveraging NFTs, DeSci offers a more democratic, transparent, and efficient way to produce, publish, and access scientific knowledge.

With its focus on decentralization, DeSci seeks to establish a scientific ecosystem that encourages new and unconventional ideas and enables anyone to contribute to and benefit from scientific research.