Blockchain: the answer to scientific publishing's problems? | Education Technology
ab1630's bookmarks 2018-08-18
Summary:
"Victor Botev, Iris.ai CTO, discusses the issues in scientific publishing's reliability, and how blockchain could be a solution to falsified research
...Blockchain also provides a useful way to validate knowledge dynamically, subsequent to publication. Science is mercurial: new information constantly arises casting doubt on older items of research, but existing publishing practices lack the proper tools to accommodate these changes in literature - retractions, replications, new findings, and so on. Blockchain, with its innate traceability, would enable the peer review process to become more of a continuous, open process. Finally, blockchain offers the potential of building entirely new economic models through issuing tokens, or digital currency, tied to the value of what the community is building: a currency tied to the most precious thing we humans possess: knowledge. With the incentives of tokenized economies frequently found in blockchain models, accurate peer reviewing, accurate research papers, and many more vital activities to maintain the community’s knowledge could all be rewarded. The influence of human bias would abate through the sheer volume of users and reviewers, and the cancellation of these biases in aggregation. An open, scalable, decentralised platform, backgrounded by blockchain, thus offers an optimal way to fix distortions that beget inaccuracies and fuel distrust in scientific knowledge generation and dissemination worldwide. A community-run engine capable of checking the underlying factual base of a given input text provides us with a unique opportunity to unbias our entire knowledge base through a new prism built with the highest transparency and accountability standards. By authenticating and certifying published research data using the blockchain, the scientific community could reduce errors and regain the public's confidence - promoting reliable research, and sorting fact from fiction. And this is, fundamentally, what science is all about."