Blockchain is NOT a cure to Academia

The story of Pluto, the rise of Scinapse

Bitcoin, de facto the first Blockchain

Retrospect 2017

Academia has been encountering some problems due to the complex misalignment of interests among many players in the research ecosystem. In 2017, several projects have emerged with the goal to solve these problems with Blockchain. Pluto team was one of the early entrants among them. We believed that Blockchain, a distributed ledger technology where a community of same interest grows a common chain of data with a consensus protocol, could help for solving this problem.

We had designed the decentralized platform which is for scholarly communication where any sort of players involved in the academia(i.e. researchers, institutes, funding agencies) can utilize with 100% confidence without the need of trust. What we mostly focused on in platform design was the process of publishing the research paper. The key point of the process of publishing is the peer review system. The peer review system is the process of subjecting an author’s scholarly work, research, or ideas to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before a paper describing this work is published in a journal, conference proceedings or as a book. The peer review helps the publisher (that is, the editor-in-chief) decide whether the work should be accepted, considered acceptable with revisions, or rejected. Current peer review system with publishers has problems in that it gives no compensation for researchers’ contributions and that it is very inefficient. So we made a lot of effort to design a peer review protocol for a publishing service in which, when a researcher publishes the paper, other researchers review the paper and receive rewards according to their contributions. We thought that on top of smart contracts system enabled with Blockchain, a reward mechanism with tokens and reputations could make better scholarly communication ecosystem. And it will be the key to solve the problem of oligopoly by commercial publishers.

Initial Pluto platform design

However, when we finished the design of the platform, we got the following question.

Does academia need the decentralized publishing platform that uses Blockchain to solve the incentive structure problem? Yes. If so, can the decentralized publishing platform solve the current problem of academia? No.

That is, although the decentralized publishing platform can alleviate the problem, it does not actually eliminate the key causes. Yes, this was a very idealistic plan. Even if there was a decentralized publishing platform, the indicators for evaluating researcher or their achievement(paper) are under the influence of journals owned by publishers. Therefore, researchers must continue to follow the Ancien Régime in order to sustain their career (incl. funding). In addition, scholarly communication as we know today has slowly evolved over the centuries, so adopting Blockchain technology in academia could be a radical change that requires a broad consensus of all stakeholders. The fact that the new platform is not easily accepted means it takes a long time to solve the problem with the new solution.

To summarize, we found the big problem in academia and were excited because we believed we could solve it. So we rushed and made a wrong judgment about priority. Suppose academia is a house, and it requires remodeling. The first step would be to check “structural design” and to find the pillars which are core support of the house, we focused on cleaning the house inside with expectations for a new house. That is, we designed the services we needed to eliminate problems identified right away, rather than figuring out the problem from a large scale to a small scale and then figuring out the roadmap for solving the problem.

Of course, this step is not meaningless. The peer review system is something that needs to be improved someday and we have experienced the pros and cons of developing decentralized protocols with smart contracts, specifically what they CAN DO and what they CAN’T. (e.g. smart contracts can’t handle with information that is not machine readable) It’s just we made a mistake in setting priority for problem-solving.

We needed to re-check the core cause of the problem.

The fundamental cause that we thought was:

Researchers and research achievements are not being evaluated rationally.

Currently, the evaluation of researchers and research achievements depend mainly on the impact factor(IF) of the journal and the number of citations or publications. That means, there is no evaluation metric which is reasonable and journal-independent.

If there are reasonable evaluation metrics, researchers could be able to just focus on their research they want, free of external nuisances. We thought this would be the most important and necessary first step in solving the problems of academia. Therefore, we decided to prioritize to make new evaluation metrics which are reliable and objective, rather than to develop a decentralized publishing platform.

Retrospect 2018

Start with Scinapse

In January 2018, we launched Scinapse the academic search engine. Because this was not the decentralized platform which we had been telling, most people had questioned.

This is based on the background mentioned above, which is the result of our re-direction to solve the problems of the academia sequentially. But why did Pluto choose an academic search engine in finding new metrics?

Why Pluto team makes Scinapse?

Pluto Beta: Initial main page of Scinapse

We were looking for a new metric to evaluate the objects of academia such as researcher, paper or anything that comes out of the research process. But there was another problem in making new evaluation metrics. The current academic data(i.e. author data, paper data) is totally a mess. There is no academic data with a standard form because all academic data is torn apart by publishers and journals. This problem makes it impossible to make metrics for evaluating individual researchers or their research achievements.

Another huge lesson we learned from our quick voyage into research ecosystem through 2017 was that we cannot solve problems, specifically these kinda where it’s largely dependent on the structural absurdities, without building a community of supporters who would be the grassroots game changers in solving the problem. That was another significant reason we determined to develop a service that can be readily used by actual researchers, right at the moment, thus a community can be formed.

In conclusion, the academic data must be refined and standardized. This is necessary not only for solving current problems of academia but also for the future research community. If academic data is well organized, new evaluation metric can be found based on this, and it makes the environment in which researchers and research achievements can be reasonably evaluated. We believed that this environment, and the community to run on this, is the first step in solving the problem of academia. So we made Scinapse!

What did Pluto do in 2018?

What we had done in 2018 can be divided into 3 broad categories.