The convergence of blockchain + science is growing and I think it’s about time for a regular newsletter of advances in the community. I don’t know if there’s enough content to do a weekly newsletter, so I’ll title the first one “monthly” but if I can find enough content next week then I’ll try to release something weekly. This one covers the month of August and the first days of September.

1 — Token Bonding Curves in Practice

Paul Kohlhaas from Molecule wrote an in-depth look into how non-fungible tokens and token bonding curves could be used to fund, curate and distribute ownership of intellectual property.

“The goal of the proposed design mechanism is to distribute risk, reward and ownership of intellectual assets and enable market participants to make early research and development stages liquid and tradable. This could have a wide range of applications in scientific development, pharmaceuticals, software development and engineering.”

2 — DEIP Testnet Went Live

DEIP, one of the projects looking to build an end-to-end decentralized research platform launched their testnet on the 6th of September.

If you’re a researcher of any kind, you can join their private beta here. I recommend it because even though it’s still in beta, what you can do already looks pretty damn awesome.

You can do everything you need in a research workflow. From creating a research group, proposing research initiatives, publishing content, reviewing and raising funds in your own token. And it’s all done with a super customizable governance that reminds me of Aragon.

“DEIP invites blockchain enthusiasts, developers and scientists to run node, simulate transactional activity and contribute to the future of science by improving the protocol. For this, create an account and see the instruction on participation on DEIP. An instruction is also available via Github.”

You can follow a thorough guide on how to use the testnet here. They also started a byweekly dev update which is great to stay up to date.

3 — Helping the Reproducibility Crisis With Prediction Markets

A study where 24 researchers attempted to replicate social-science studies published between 2010 and 2015 in Nature and Science. The replications followed analysis plans reviewed by the original authors and had sample sizes on average five times larger than the original studies. They could find strong effects in the same direction as the original studies in 13 out of the 21 studies (62%).

At the same time, they ran a prediction market with 206 researchers that had to bet on the probability of different papers being successfully reproduced. The market was very accurate both in the total reproducibility percentage as in the individual paper odds.

The study is relevant to the blockchain space, as prediction markets are one of the cryptoeconomic primitives that have developed in the past few years, and it’s exciting to see how we can apply them to open science.

Furthermore, we find that peer beliefs of replicability are strongly related to replicability, suggesting that the research community could predict which results would replicate and that failures to replicate were not the result of chance alone.

4 — European Science Funders Ban Grantees From Publishing in Paywalled Journals

A growing coalition that already represents half of all EU scientific funding, from 2020 will only fund research where:

The author keeps the copyright.

The journal is fully open (Hybrid journals need not apply).

The paper is open from the moment of publication.

APC will be standardized and capped

The dwindling walled garden that publishers have enforced on humanity’s knowledge continues to fall apart. This is massive news for open science in general, and it positively affects blockchain projects. As the status quo is rattled and new business models and non-profit avenues are explored, decentralized platforms will get their fair test run.

To the participating founders: Austrian Science Fund, French National Research Agency, Science Foundation Ireland, National Institute for Nuclear Physics, National Research Fund, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Research Council of Norway, National Science Centre, Slovenian Research Agency, Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development, UK Research and Innovation.

5 — Scienceroot First Token Sale Ended

Scienceroot, another of the end-to-end research platforms on development finished their first token generation event this August. I couldn’t find info on final contributions, but they have had a good amount of interest and social interaction previous and during the round. They were looking for a very reasonable €500.000 on this first round so hopefully, they reached their goal.

6 — Ecosystem Visualization

Francisco Santos created a visualization of the growing blockscience ecosystem. From the link, you can also go to a spreadsheet with useful data about each project. There are 29 blockchain projects already.

You can join the Telegram community here.

7 — On the Prospects of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies for Open Science and Academic Publishing

A paper from the Semantic Web Journal on how blockchain could be used to replace the current infrastructure of publishers and journals. The system is mocked as an ERC20 compliant token with a smart contract backbone running on ethereum. They go into all the details of how the workflow could work, functions that the smart contracts would need, etc.

It’s interesting to get the point of view of an actual journal, and one that is already doing open and transparent publishing. I would’ve liked for them to contemplate other options instead of just sticking to transferring the same structure that they have into a blockchain. But maybe in a future paper, they will.

The U.S. government will help fund a distributed ledger platform being developed by researchers at the University of California-San Diego.

“a web-based cyberinfrastructure platform built using distributed ledger technologies that allows researchers to provide metadata and verification information about their scientific datasets and update this information as the datasets change and evolve over time in an auditable manner.”

An essay from Karmen Condic-Jurkic on the current state of academia, and the role that decentralized technologies could play in the efforts to improve it.

An article by Amen Sanghera and Rui Zhou about the benefits and use cases of blockchain in the healthcare industry. From interoperable medical records, prescription sharing, patient wearables to mine and share anonymized data, supply chain transparency, clinical trials, and consent management.

Lambert Heller from Blockchain for Science wrote the third piece of a series of articles on the new perspectives that blockchain could bring to the scientific ecosystem.

It advocates going from a client/server paradigm to a peer2peer ecosystem using protocols like DAT and IPFS. Using a transparent blockchain to track value added by all participants in the ecosystem without needing third parties and keeping education certificates on the blockchain, so that attestations survive the lifespan of validating institutions.

Upcoming

A big conference is coming on the 5th and 6th of November inBerlin. If you’re interested in the convergence of open science and blockchain I’d recommend that you attend!

Lastly

Feel free to forward this to someone who would find it valuable, and If there’s something I missed, or you have some news for next week/month, then ping me on twitter @maurovelazquezz!