Pleased to announce the winner of "The future of ____" contest: KARMALA
The future of scientific contribution
Problem: Scientific research is becoming increasingly competitive. Research constitutes a major economic sector in terms of employment with millions of jobs at Universities and research institutes worldwide. The value in terms of future prospects of any researcher is measured in the amount and quality of peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals. It is the outmost important determinant of any careers in the sector. As it is said: “publish or vanish”. However, the peer-review process is slow and can take up to 2-3 years for a single publication (depending on the discipline). Moreover, high quality journals have a rejection rate of above 90%. Thus, a potential paper might go through several lengthy processes until publication. The final publication is then the proof that some concepts and results originated from a specific researcher. There are roughly 50 million published articles out there and the rat race for new ideas has intensified. A central building blog in the scientific discourse is the presentation of non-peer reviewed working papers on conferences and seminars prior to publication. Many scientific conferences only require handing in an extended abstract. Unfortunately, concepts and innovations presented in those forums are increasingly copied and pushed forward for peer-review by third parties. The scientific community has not introduced any useful methods to prevent this.
An attempt to prove that the initial scientific contribution belongs to a certain researcher is to upload a working paper in special online directories (e.g.
http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/ for agricultural economics). However, this service is (1) centralized and (2) does allow setting the time of publication to a point in the past! Thus, there is a total lack of “proof-of-scientific contribution” before the final publication in a peer-reviewed article. Any other sector knows copy-right protection mechanisms but they are absent in science. Eroded trust in the scientific network must find new trustless solutions.
Solution: The notary service on the clearinghouse protocol is able to solve this problem. The “proof-of-scientific contribution” can be realized by the immutability of the block chain. A document containing a scientific contribution can be associated with the public address of the individual researcher. A history of immutable contributions can solve any dispute during a later peer-review process and discourages the theft of ideas in the first place. Hashes of the contribution papers can be published on the websites of institutes proving that a certain contribution has existed at a certain time. Transfer of ownership is not applicable to this problem as the originator of a scientific contribution is immutable. However, searchable content might be an advantage. That is, additional meta-data about the discipline, methodology and focus should be stored on the block chain and be searchable by a specific block explorer. Any individual or institution could thus browse in real time through the advancement of global scientific contributions. No economic or political interests can latter change or circumvent a scientific contribution. Thus, I propose a sub-section of the notary in the clearwallet with is designated for non-published contributions and a function to store additional meta-information together with the hash. Transfer of ownership should be disabled for this application.
Thanks to all those who participated! Karmala, you'll be receiving 1000 VIA and 10,000 XCH shortly! (500 from me, 500 + the 10,000 XCH from drak)
All of the submissions were excellent, and I'd love to see them pursued. If you'd like any help with working to bring them to life, reach out!