Mapping the blockchain for science landscape – FranklOpenScience – Medium

"At Frankl, we’re working towards a blockchain-enabled science. And we’re thinking and dreaming big. A distributed immutable ledger of scientific data, open (with appropriate controls) and accessible to all who could benefit from it Academic papers published freely and openly at minimal costs to authors and readers A mechanism for seamlessly tracking and rewarding the contributions of individual scientists We’re working toward that goal. Our start point is to develop apps for cognitive assessment that allow automatised archiving of data as it’s collected. Our token (the Frankl) provides access to those apps and rewards members of the scientific community who engage in open science practices. There are a number of reasons why we think this is a strategic place to set the ball rolling. But we’re not the only ones thinking big about blockchain-enabled science. Blockchain projects are springing up all round the world, focusing on different parts of the scientific enterprise. It’s an exciting time to be in this space. So here without further ado is our run-down of blockchain science projects that have caught our eye, organised according to the broad issues they’re seeking to address (we’ll update this periodically, so feel free to let us know what we’ve missed and what’s new).

Research funding

Scientific research requires money. But with limited funds (and so low success rates), researchers often spend large amounts of their time applying for research grants. Time that could be spent doing actual research. Can blockchain and “crypto-tokens for science” make research funding fairer and more efficient? Pan-European team ScienceRoot are creating “a centralized portal” that lists grants from around the world. It will also allow researchers to showcase their ideas and crowd source funding. “In the future this will be able to work not only with Science Tokens but also with individual tokens created for each project.”..."