Hi guys, we meet again in a new article. In this article, I want to talk about Scienceroot, a cryptocurrency project that aims to solve the problems in the scientific community. This is the first time I see a project like this, so I'm excited to do a quick review of it. I hope you'll enjoy this article too. Don't forget to follow me!
The Problems in Scientific Community
In a nutshell, Scienceroot is a platform for crowdfunding, collaboration, and publishing of scientific journals. Just from this definition, you'll know that they wanted to solve three important problems in the scientific community right now when they wanted to research, collaborate and publish their works. I'll outline this three problems in short because the details are already written in Scienceroot whitepaper.
There is an increasing trends of research funding amount. Source: here
The first problem is funding. To do a research, regardless of what kind of research it is, we need money. It is almost impossible to write a proper research without a proper funding. The quality of funding, at some point, determine the quality of the research itself. Because if the researchers have a good funding, they can use the highest technology available to test their hypothesis, gather data, access to a specific research area, and so on.
The bad news is, it is hard to get funding for your research. Usually, we'll have to request funding for some foundation, or government bodies. Those parties have their own interest and that's why they won't risk spending money to support a research which doesn't directly related to their own interest. That's why getting a proper funding is hard to do.
Another statistics showing the same things. Source: here
The second problem is collaboration. There is no proper platform where researchers can interact with each other, or gain access to data that they need. Institutional limitations, infrastructure limitations, and other things, 'cause researchers need collaborative works to make it happens.
The last problem is research publishing. The competition in research publishing is though because journals papers are limited and their editors must choose the most relevant topics to their journals. Not only that, because of this, people and researchers in general needs to pay to access that journals. What makes it worse is that almost all of that money goes to the institution, and not the researchers.
A very great infographic about publishing cost. You can access image source and the full article about this problem here
The Needs for A New Platform
Based on the problems I've outlined above, it is pretty clear that the scientific community needs a new platform for crowdfunding, publishing and research collaboration. By making it decentralized and open to the public via blockchain, we can see a new and revolutionary way of scientific papers production. And this is where Scienceroot comes in.