An example of a DeSci system that conforms to these ideals might begin by replacing the primary currency of research scientists – published articles – with NFTs. These NFTs can be minted and owned by the authors, with the actual manuscript and associated code and datasets hosted on IPFS (or another decentralised storage such as Arweave or... See more

While writing this article I pulled together a very early “proof-of-concept” for a DeSci publishing platform called SciFoundry. So far, SciFoundry is an ERC721 smart contract hosted on the Rinkeby testnet. Users can mint their articles and receive an NFT which can be viewed on Opensea. Anyone can download the full article and its assets using the... See more

It's a surprising and unfortunate fact that the majority of the world's research, mostly conducted with public funding, is kept behind paywalls run by a tiny number of publishing corporations. But perhaps it doesn't have to be this way.

Ultimately these structural problems with science funding and publishing have arisen from centralized control – a small pool of power-players sculpt the scientific landscape and have created a deeply imbalanced industry from what should be a public good.