Prospects for Solving Issues of Scientific Research Using Blockchain Technologies

Any research requires quite a lot of hard work from scientists. Most of the studies cannot give significant results, but they can become part of a chain leading to something large‑scale, while some developments were initially supposed to be among the most important inventions of humanity.

Unfortunately, modern science is in crisis, especially in the post-Soviet countries. There are many reasons for the existing situation: lack of adequate financing and support for research and development, “stagnant” scientists of Research Institutes and Academies of Sciences, lack of motivation for young specialists, numerous bureaucratic procedures while registering results, high cost of publications in popular editions, lack of opportunities to work closely with foreign colleagues, etc.

All the issues mentioned above became a trigger for numerous irreversible processes related to science: migration of promising staff to other countries and moving to other activities, decrease in the number of research areas and lack of social interest to them. Elimination of these factors in the context of modern realities will require much time and money.

It is clear that science needs a “revolution” — significant changes are not just long overdue, they are vital for the existence of this activity area.

Any research requires a result and an acknowledgement, which can be presented to the entire academic community — an article in a prestigious international edition. It does not really matter how global a scientist’s tasks are, the main factors are a number of publications, a citation index and an author’s h-index because the grant size, which the scientist can receive, depends on it. An additional difficulty is to publish an article in the international edition, and it costs much money. It is also worth mentioning that journal subscription fees (Science, Nature and Elsevier) are hundreds of dollars, and many scientists just cannot afford that. Such monopolistic editions earn a lot of money on issuing exclusive publications and do not spend even a penny on research.

The problem relating to producing good results is equally important. Modern society has little interest in scientific activities, but it definitely requires positive results of studies. Everything should work out: medications for diseases should be found quickly, at the right time and at a low price, environmental conservation methods should be simple and available to the public, while food products — be healthy and of high quality. Nowadays, both scientific community and admass society do not consider the fact that a negative result is a result too, and it is no less important for research studies in any field because, thanks to the obtained result, further studies may be more significant. But, a negative result of the research is equal to a “professional suicide” as the scientific community has a negative attitude towards failures. That is why scientists have to put negative results in a favorable light, which leads to the emergence of pseudoscience.

Another important problem of modern science is short-term grants (2 or 3 years): public financing is too low, that is why grant funds are spent on all needs including payment of wages, which implies an inability to start significant long-term research. As a result, there are numerous predictable studies, which form a phenomenon of “safe science” and compete with each other for grants that sponsor the same insignificant studies. This is an endless circle.

There is another problem in the context of this one — the so-called “conflict of interests”. Due to the lack of decent public financing, scientists have to turn to the commercial sector — producers. It means that drug research is sponsored by drug manufacturers, food quality depends on the money invested by food producers, and the end customer receives a “purchased” result and a product, which is far from the claimed quality.

The majority of scientists are not satisfied with the current situation, which is why they are seeking ways out of it. The development of the latest technologies and emergence of distributed ledgers led us to believe that transition to Blockchain will improve research life-cycle. Transparency of projects, their immutability and availability, an opportunity to exclude numerous intermediaries and to skip bureaucratic red tape — these are the main arguments for the integration of Blockchain into the research field. It might become a worthy technical solution to data collection, storage and processing as well as facilitate the expert review process. At the same time, scientists still do not know how to address problems of authorship, reviewing and piracy. Thus, due to certain unresolved problems, the idea is still being considered.

An example of solving the problem of attracting funds to scientific developments is the establishment of the Einsteinium Foundation, which is a Blockchain-based network designed to raise funds for investing in science. The Foundation has issued its own EMC2 crypto currency, and it is planned to finance scientific studies in various fields through mining of this crypto currency. Every month, funds will be allocated for the projects, which have received maximum number of votes from the Foundation members. The idea of Einsteinium is quite essential, and it can become a powerful international sponsor in the future, but only a few specialists can receive grants from it.

Modern technologies do not stand still, and even today, there is a unique opportunity to control the situation from attracting investments to science to patenting and licensing. The Bitbon System, an innovative project, developed and created by Simcord company, is not just an investment platform with advanced features but also a great opportunity to solve numerous problems of modern science.

Searching for grants, sponsors and attracting them to projects take much time and effort from scientists, but now all this can be easily implemented through the Bitbon System. The initial research idea, processing and evaluation of results, publishing achievements and stage-by-stage funds allocation are integrated into a single System, which greatly facilitates the entire research process and makes inventions available to the whole world. As a result, any scientific idea can be financed within the System regardless of its implementation period.

In addition, the author receives a unique opportunity to attract leading experts in their fields to the project development, get their advice and review, register copyrights and patents for his/her inventions and develop a strategy for financing his/her project while a business plan is being drawn up. Thus, an absolutely transparent business plan is being worked out, and each System participant can learn about it and invest his/her Bitbon (digital asset) into the selected project, which is used as a payment unit within the System.

By becoming a System member, a scientist receives an opportunity not only to easily attract financing and carry out necessary research but also to promote greater collaboration with experts in this field from other countries, receive their comments and assessment or simply exchange information. It will help to significantly reduce the migration of talented people to European countries in the hope of finding opportunities to implement their ideas.

It is also important that the Bitbon System is a blockchain-based system, and all data stored in the chain of blocks is unchanged and available to each user. That solves the issue of storing data without the risk of its loss or substitution as well as its availability to the public. Let us consider the following example: an author receives an opportunity to popularize the results of his/her research in the international Blockchain network, which is, in fact, more prestigious than an expensive article publication in the established editions. In addition, as it was mentioned earlier, there is a problem of reporting negative results, which play an important role for future developments, but mostly they are not revealed. The principle of a distributed ledger within the System allows placing any kind of information thereby reducing the percentage of the same studies and informing the community about the inability to carry out a certain experiment. Each scientist should have some knowledge while carrying out his/her research — which direction to move in and how to avoid mistakes, which were made by others. In the context of the Bitbon System, the platform contains all research data, and everyone can get access to it no matter where he/she is.

Considering all the above-mentioned, the Bitbon System is a promising platform for establishing a new scientific community format. And, if the scientific community is ready for progressive changes, then maybe the Bitbon System is the beginning of these changes?