The blockchain and its potential for science and academic publishing

1.Current challenges in scholarly communication

When researchers want to communicate their findings, they usually use different - and to a large extent disconnected - systems in their research workflow. For example, spreadsheets or lab software are used to capture the results of an experiment. When results are collected, an article is written using a local writing application or a cloud-based collaborative writing tool. The article is then submitted to a publisher through a submission system. After review and acceptance the manuscript is converted to PDF and HTML, and then is hosted on a publisher platform, from which it can be downloaded. Access to this publisher platform is often facilitated by librarians. Citations are collected in citation databases that are distributed through librarians or via freely-accessible databases.

This workflow is problematic for several reasons. First of all, research only becomes accessible at the point of publication. Everything that takes place prior to this - such as collecting and analyzing data, peer review, etc. - is not transparent. This lack of transparency leads to problems around reproducibility, i.e., the inability of researchers to reproduce experiments in order to validate the conclusions made in research papers, a practice that is a cornerstone of the scientific method. In a 2016 poll on Nature.com, two-thirds of respondents indicated that current level of reproducibility is a major problem, with 52% saying that there is a “significant crisis” in the ability of researchers to validate prior work.

Peer review - the process whereby research papers are evaluated by researchers working in the same field before a paper is published in a journal - is in a similar situation. The process remains opaque. There is also a lack of visibility and recognition for reviewers, with their review work remaining largely unnoticed.

Scientific results are primarily published in academic journals, which have a strong tendency to publish positive and novel results. Moreover, scientists themselves are more inclined to report on their successful outcomes rather than on failed experiments. A lot of research that did not lead to positive results, therefore, remains unpublished, and unknown. Moreover, as the productivity of researchers is predominantly measured in terms of journal article output, scientific efforts leading to negative results and non-research activities (e.g. reviewing articles and grant applications, sitting on scientific committees, or even micro-contributions such as participation in brainstorms, informal comments) are undervalued.

Additionally, there are challenges in research and scholarly communication that have to do with commercial interests. Research is essentially a non-commercial activity, but ironically the business of scholarly communication is one of the most lucrative industries in the world, dominated by a few large publishing giants. This causes several issues. High prices charged by commercial publishers for subscriptions challenges library budgets, and implies that not all content is made accessible to scientists at institutions. Partly as a reaction to the problems associated with the subscription model, Open Access, the model whereby payment is shifted from the reader or library to the author granting universal access to the article, has been introduced. But several decades after its introduction, still only a minority of articles are open access. Moreover, open access has introduced its own set of problems, such as the incentive of publishers to accept articles potentially leading to less rigorous quality norms, and the appearance of so-called “predatory” publishers, i.e., exploitative publishers that charge publication fees to authors without providing the editorial and publishing services that are associated with legitimate journals.

2.How could blockchain technology help scholarly communication?

3.Will scholarly communication take place on the blockchain?

In light of its obvious advantages over the current ecosystem, it is tempting to predict that scholarly communication and other research activities will eventually take place on the blockchain. Its potential impact touches many, if not all, challenges around scholarly communication, especially those to do with trust, reproducibility, transparency, and access. However, there are also reasons to be cautious.

Science has evolved over hundreds of years, and with its history comes a significant amount of legacy in technology, systems, organization, as well culture. This legacy makes any change difficult, despite the challenges associated with the current system. The likelihood and success of a blockchain for scholarly communication would also depend on its level of implementation. For example, information stored on the blockchain could be restricted to traditional researcher roles, publications, and use of content (e.g. authorship of scientific articles, usage and citations). But it could also reward unconventional roles and affect wider aspects of the research workflow, including peer review, publication of datasets, hypotheses, etc., which would increase the level of complexity. In connection to this, an essential question is whether blockchain technology will be embraced by existing players such as the major science publishers or whether it will be successfully introduced by external parties, such as Scienceroot and Pluto. Scienceroot is an open access blockchain-based scientific ecosystem that combines all of the functionalities required during the scientific discovery process – from funding through research to publishing (see: https://www.scienceroot.com/) and Pluto is a decentralized scholarly communication platform powered by etherium blockchain (see: https://pluto.network/). Both of these players have the potential to disrupt the current scholarly communication ecosystem and only the future will tell. The use of blockchain technology is growing and innovative applications bear watching.