Originally published on my other blog at https://rebelcientist.blogspot.com/2025/02/how-blockchain-can-transform-science.html
When people think of blockchain, they usually think of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. While cryptocurrency is great, it is certainly not the only use of blockchain technology. Another use rarely talked about is decentralized publishing and proof of intellectual property, which has potential to change many industries that use publishing, including science. This can be done either by using a decentralized publishing blockchain based platform, or by minting a book or article as an NFT on the Ethereum, Solana, or other blockchain that allows smart contracts, and then publishing somewhere else. In fact, a person can do both. While NFTs are often associated with bad, highly overpriced digital artwork, just like the blockchain technology they are based on, that is by far not their only use. NFTs used for publishing purposes can provide proof of ownership for self-published material, which could greatly benefit scientists and the lay public alike.
Image "test tubes stock image" from a Google search for public domain science images.
Benefits to Science
Ways in which it could benefit scientists is by allowing them to bypass gatekeepers at big journals, giving them ownership of their content, and having peer review done after publication rather than before. If an article is peer reviewed after it is published, that makes it much harder for other scientists to steal the idea. Ways it could benefit the public go beyond science, but as far as science goes, it could make most scientific articles open access and greatly increase scientific literacy. The push for decentralized publishing in science is part of a larger movement called science related populism.
Here is one tip for those interested in groundbreaking scientific research but don't know how to read and understand primary scientific articles: find an open source article on a topic that interests you using Google Scholar or ResearchGate, and if you come across a word you don't know, just google the definition. You may have to piece together an image of what the research is talking about by doing this with more than one article, but eventually you will gain a relatively clear understanding of the topic.
To understand why the problem in science is so severe, we must take a look at history. For most of science history, or at since America existed, science was done in a way that promoted quality over quantity. Scientists would do research in their labs, gather lots of relevant data, and then publish their results. They would often go out on a limb with a novel theory, take a risk in pursuit of that theory, since it might turn out to be false, and then publish their findings once they gathered enough data to support it. If they failed to support their hypothesis, they would risk a possible blow to their reputation and access to funding, but it was a risk they were able to take. However, there is evidence that science no longer works that way.
The way science works today is that quantity is favored over quality, and scientists are judged by how many papers they publish rather than the quality of their papers and research. This mentality has been referred to as "publish or perish" and has actually been criticized by many scientists, including ResearchGate founder Ijad Madisch, and physicist turned YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder. Sabine has even gone as far as to say that she thinks that science is no longer self correcting because of this quantity over quality mentality. While I don't agree with her on everything, I appreciate her open-mindedness and willingness to discuss problems in how modern scientific research is done.
I have known for a while that something was wrong with how modern science is done, since there are not as many breakthroughs as there were in the past, but I didn't know what the problem was. From people like Sabine, and several guests on Jordan Peterson's podcast, I have pieced together that the reason quantity is valued over quality is because more papers means more grant money, which is increasingly what science is about these days. University administrators take a significant cut of that grant money. Because of that, they push scientists who do research to submit lots of grant proposals and to research views within current dogma, because they perceive these as having the most potential for grant money. This also forces scientists to take the next obvious step, instead of making great leaps like Einstein and the physicists of the early 1900s did. There is even evidence that writing grant proposals now takes up the largest share of a scientists time on the job, rather than doing research or writing papers about it. If you ask me, that is just absurd.
In the video above, Sabine discusses the harm caused by "publish or perish" culture
The good news is I am not the only one who thinks blockchain can help with this problem. There are scientists out there who advocate for blockchain use in science publishing, including the authors of the article "A Review on Blockchain Technology and Blockchain Projects Fostering Open Science" by Stephan Leible et. al. They argue that if science were made open in the way that they want, it would allow anyone to contribute to or participate in science, presumably even including laypeople to some degree. There is also a project called SciNFT, which I learned about from Grok on X, that has a token called Sci token. Sci Token is a cryptocurrency dedicated to scientific NFTs, which will allow scientists to mint their research paper as an NFT. Once minted as an NFT, a scientist may publish their paper elsewhere.
With all of this in mind, one thing is for sure, and that is the need for something to change. Had science been this way in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it is likely that many of the greatest discoveries, including quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the discovery of how germs cause disease, would either have not been made, or would have been significantly delayed. Hopefully blockchain assisted peer review, which can be done after the article is published rather than before, helps get scientific research back to what it should be and at the same time makes science articles more open to the public.
If you like this article, then check out my blog on Google blogger at https://rebelcientist.blogspot.com/, where starting with this post, I post the same content. In the future I also intend to link the Google Blogger to my LinkedIn profile as I heard you can blog there too. I intend to write a lot about interesting cutting edge scientific research topics, how science can be made more interesting for laypeople, how blockchain and makerspaces can transform science, and elaborate more on how to read scientific articles as a layperson.
Citations and supporting data
https://www.researchgate.net/about
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/blockchain/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2019.00016/full
