Blockchain-Based Solutions for Scientific Research - Nasdaq.com

"Science has come a long way since the days when heliocentrism was controversial and most people believed in spontaneous generation . Yet when it comes to sharing and verifying scientific work, the systems that researchers still rely upon today date back to an era of premodern science. This is a challenge that blockchain technology can help to solve. By providing new ways to share academic research and verify the origin of information, blockchains could introduce significant new efficiencies and transparency to the world of research. Here's a look at how blockchain-based solutions are driving innovation in the world of academic research.

The State of Academic Research

The U.S. federal government spends more than $150 billion per year to fund scientific research, and that is just one of several major sources of research funding. Meanwhile, academic researchers publish millions of scholarly papers every year, in addition to other types of publications. Yet despite the huge amount of money and time that the academic community spends on research, the ability of scholars to find and track the resulting information is surprisingly limited, for several reasons.

Lack of Universal Research Registers

You might think that there is a central database where you could easily look up all of the journal articles published on a given topic or in a given academic discipline. But there's not. When researchers want to find out what other researchers have already discovered about a certain subject, they typically take an approach that can be described as "ad hoc" at best. A researcher can search through a variety of library catalogs and journal databases. But because there is no single database that registers all published material in any field, there is no guarantee that this type of search will be comprehensive. Plus, because academic publishing tends to move slowly and research databases are not always updated frequently, a catalog-based search for a certain topic might yield results that no longer reflect the latest insight on a topic...."