A ‘cloud’ science community powered by digital tokens

Yu Wang1,2 and George M. Church 1,2

1. Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

2. Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Correspondence: Yu Wang (yuwang.harvard@gmail.com) and George M. Church (gchurch@genetics.med.harvard.edu)

In an era of fast-developing technologies, we have seen numerous aspects of our life being revolutionized. E-commerce such as Amazon and Alibaba changed how we shop; social network platforms such as Facebook and Tiktok changed how we communicate; sharing/gig companies such as Uber and Airbnb changed how we utilize properties. However, the ways that we scientists carry out research and share data and results have not been keeping pace. How can we best use technologies to transform the ways that research is done to increase scientific integrity and facilitate scientific discovery? How can we convince researchers to adapt to a radically different system? We here envision how cloud and digital currency technologies could change how we conduct and share research in the next ten years.

A cloud scientific publishing system: social network-based publishing and crowdsourced peer review

The idea of ‘open science’ is gaining attraction among the scientific community, with an increasing number of journals becoming open-access. However, open science is not only about the negotiation between scientists and publishers, but also about how “open” scientists are within the community: how “open” scientists are to share their results or even ideas before their work is published in journals, and how “open” scientists are to collaborate and share credits with peer scientists.

The appearance of arXiv, BioRxiv, ChemRxiv, and MedRxiv provides several preprint platforms for scientists to release scientific work bypassing the time-consuming reviewing process utilized by traditional journals. There is no doubt that such preprint servers have expedited sharing of results among peer researchers, and their impact has been particularly obvious during the COVID-19 pandemic when fast result sharing among scientists has helped the globe to fight the disease. However, such servers are constantly under criticisms for lacking quality control. In addition, those platforms do not save scientists’ efforts to push their work officially accepted by academic journals, which implies that researchers are still impacted by all the drawbacks of the traditional publishing system.

Here, we propose to build a scientist social network platform for scientific publishing and crowdsourced peer review. In this e-network, each researcher creates an account non-anonymously, and the system can track their academic credentials automatically. Once a new article is published on the server, the system can automatically identify keywords or utilize the keywords set by the authors and deliver the article to peer scientists who share the same research interest or hold expertise in the techniques used. Peer scientists are allowed to leave comments and raise questions on the articles, and authors can respond and revise accordingly. There are a few benefits of this system. Firstly, the social network nature of the system helps the users to share their academic work per their own scientific interest. In addition, compared with the current peer-review system that relies on the opinions of two to three reviewers, this system compiles opinions from tens to hundreds of researchers from diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, it normalizes the relationship between authors and reviewers and creates an open and friendly environment for scientific discussion.

To encourage scientists to engage in such interactions, we propose to develop and distribute digital tokens based on users’ activities. The platform can use tokens to reward scientists who conduct peer review. In addition, authors can set up tokens to reward peer scientists to review the article, and peer scientists can reward the authors for responding to their reviews. Since the e-network would be non-anonymous and all activities are documented and open to the public, we imagine that inappropriate behaviors would be naturally suppressed.

Digital tokens as a way for scientific credit sharing

Scientific progress is a collective effort from thousands of researchers, and a key challenge in the community is how to share credits. Neither ‘the winner takes all’ nor ‘equal distribution’ is a sound strategy, although they have been adopted in various circumstances. The inability of distributing credits based on contribution has hindered scientists, especially young scientists, from being acknowledged but also created a competitive environment in which scientists are constantly under the pressure of losing credits (i.e., being ‘scooped’).

Here, we propose to utilize digital tokens for credit sharing. Similar to companies, the credit of a project can be split into shares and realized using digital tokens. All researchers who are involved in a project are allocated with shares/digital tokens that represent their contribution to the project. The allocation is based on the researchers’ agreement and are guided by certain rules or policies, and more importantly, is transparent and open to the public. Funding agencies can also use tokens to fund certain task-based scientific projects, and set up a wiki-like website where researchers can accomplish tasks and receive token rewards. Researchers can also self-organize and crowd-fund projects using tokens to attract talents and expertise.

Science is a collective effort across different generations. As the saying goes, stand on the shoulders of giants. Those ‘giants’ are barely rewarded besides being cited, and in many cases, are neglected. With digital tokens, researchers can also allocate a part of the shares to reward previous scientific work. Technologies can be developed to automatically trace and help identify past contributions. This may also help academic researchers to benefit from commercial products or therapeutics that are based on their scientific contribution.

As an extension of this concept, we also propose to set up a scientific award to acknowledge the “collective-mind” nature of science using non-fungible digital tokens (NFTs). NFTs are a type of digital tokens in which each token is unique and not interchangeable with other tokens in the same kind. They have been widely used to represent the ownership of digital arts, collectibles, etc. Unlike other scientific awards that have a set number of awardees, this scientific award aims to acknowledge all scientists who have contributed to the field. The non-fungible nature of the tokens makes them like the ‘chocolate frog cards’ in Harry Potter or other collectibles.

e-Commerce and sharing economy for scientific products and services

During the time working in lab, we always wish to have a platform that is similar to Amazon and eBay from which we can quickly order research reagents, read and write reagent reviews, and sell/share unused reagents that will otherwise be wasted. This cloud commerce platform, if developed, can be further integrated with the researcher network and token platform described above. The tokens that scientists receive as rewards for engaging in community activities can be used to trade for coupons or second-hand reagents from peer labs. The potential spaces where users could redeem these coupons would be enormous, and could be used towards journal subscription, conference participation, and reagent discount, etc.

The success of gig economy platforms (such as Uber and Airbnb) indicates that not only commercial companies but also regular individuals can become vendors and provide reagents. Lab-generated materials are generally rare so they may not be of interest to companies for commercialization, but they are also useful in research. The cloud commerce platform could be a good place to facilitate such transactions. Besides research materials, specialized equipment and techniques that can only be obtained through collaboration at the moment could also be provided as a service from individual labs. Researchers can use tokens to ‘purchase’ such services from other laboratories. This provides a new way for laboratories to obtain research funding, and might be particularly useful for small laboratories that are impacted by the ‘funding inequity’.

We wrote this perspective in the middle of the quarantine due to the COVID-19 outbreak when the vast majority of research activities wound down globally. Thanks to the video meeting/conference technologies, we are still able to discuss science directly with each other. Thanks to the online data storage platforms, we are still able to share our data and results directly with each other. The time is ripe for us to realize that the scientific community can and should utilize technologies to develop novel ways to conduct and share research. Now is the moment to recognize that we need collaboration rather than competition among countries, laboratories, and individual researchers as the way to enable scientific discoveries and to expedite therapeutic development. We expect this perspective essay to stir more brainstorms and detailed plans in this direction and to attract talent and financial interest within and outside the scientific community to transform how we conduct and share research in the future.

Note:

While we were preparing this perspective, we are grateful to receive numerous supports, interests, comments, and questions from the community. We here selected a few key questions to address:

1) Who/Which entity will fund and build the platform, and who/which entity will govern the platform?

Ideally, a non-profit organization can be found to build and maintain the platform. However, given that a significant amount of funds may be required to set the platform up, a for-profit but social impact-driven company could be found to ensure timely and efficient delivery of benefits to the community. On the other hand, it raises concerns about the governance and regulation of the platform. We believe that although the platform is built by a certain company, the value of the platform is given by users (i.e., the community). Therefore, the users should be the ultimate owners and decision-makers. We propose a two-tier governance system: the first titer is formed by a committee of the company management team, capital investors, and scientific advisors in which the decision-making power of scientific advisors should not be less than capital investors; the second titer consists of a digital voting system that is open to all users, and a decision made by the company can be vetoed if more than 1/3 of active users reject the decision. It is also possible for users to receive dividends from the company as the ‘owners’ of the platform.

2) Where does the value of tokens reside? How to set and who can set the values for the tokens in the platform?

A few different kinds of tokens are described in this perspective, and the values of tokens can be based on their acquisition methods and use. We here propose a multi-tier system listed in the table below.

Tiers	Description	Acquisition methods	Use	Exchange	Rate	Amount
Tier 1	Basic tokens	Distributed by the platform for user activities on the platform (e.g., peer-review)	Exchange with peer users; Exchange with the platform for coupons;	Within the platform (Close system);	N/A	Unlimited
Tier 2	Advanced tokens	Tokens purchased using real-world currencies	Purchase reagents/ materials/ services; can be cashed into real-world currencies	Directly exchangeable with real-world currencies	Semi-fixed (linked with a real-world currency)	Based on the capital inflow to the platform
Tier 3	Special tokens/ non-fungible tokens	Honorary awards; Patent; scientific discovery credits etc.	Collection; honorary activities; represent ownership or use rights; receive dividends from the platform	Potentially exchangeable with real-world currencies	Floating	Unlimited overall but may be limited for each issue

Preprint

Preprint

A ‘cloud’ science community powered by digital tokens