DeSci - Decentralised Science

Despite its reputation as a ridged, slow moving establishment, the scientific academy has often been at the centre of early adoption in new technological domains. A case in point is the early development and use of the internet along with many of its fundamental applications such as URL, email and RSS. Targeting applications that add value and address problems in the scientific academy may be an effective way to stimulate early adoption of the Cardano network.

The potential of decentralised scientific (DeSci) platforms is vast. One can foresee a multitude of possible applications addressing such problems as collaboration recognition, employment contracts, grant funding, data authenticity and above all - public trust in the scientific method. The key for early adoption will be to focus on a limited number of applications that can be designed and tested on the small scale, before scaling up to be introduced to the wider academic community. A decentralised peer-review system based on block-chain tokens and smart contracts is one such example.

Tokenising a scientific paper for example, would allow its value to be quantified depending on its engagement (number of reads, comments, citations etc.) with the community. Not only could the authors receive some of that value from their work (adding to their reputation as competent researchers), but it could also provide a way for reviewers to receive value from their all important (and often overlooked) work as well. This would better incentivise authors and reviewers to work together to produce higher quality publications than does the current model. The delegation of peer reviewing duties and the dissemination of the resulting publications can all be handled by the network. Thus removing the need for the gate-keeper publishers of the current model. All importantly, these processes would be transparent and accessible to the global public.

A test application could be built around a small network of interested researchers publishing, reviewing and engaging with papers in a tokenised environment. To expand the prospect of wide-spread adoption, researchers outside of the block-chain and informatics communities should be targeted. Simple, "light-hearted" publications should be encouraged as way for researchers to play with the system without distracting from their ongoing research. The exchange of value need not be in ada, however that might provide a strong participation incentive at this early stage. Some funding would be needed to contract software developers from the Cardano community in order to help build a well functioning prototype environment.