Actually, anything that involves storing data can be a blockchain. It doesn't take muc effort to come up with any idea. Besides, it may so happen that someone else has already thought about what I propose here.
Scientific publications should all be open access and have copyleft licenses. Specially when they are financed by governments and public entities or they are in the health field. Currently peer reviewing has some bias and bureaucracy isn't helping. So my proposal is making some sort of steemit copycat. Scientists would publish their articles in the blockchain, analogous to steemit posts. Instead of curation you'd have the concept of peer reviewing, however it wouldn't be a careless activity. Reviewers would be selected at random, according to their field of expertise and they should also be able to endorse the reviewing process to someone more appropriate. The author should be held anonymous during this reviewing process in order to avoid biases. There are lots of considerations to take into account. One of the most important is the reputation.
Scientific articles would be public even if they are rejected or flagged as low quality. Thus, no censorship and fully open access. The whole process of reviewing would also be stored making science way more transparent. Universities and institutes would maintain their blockchain servers and their authors credentials instead of paying expensive subscriptions to closed journals.
New universities and research institutes would be able to publish without much bureaucracy and elitism. Without special permissions from some superior entity. Of course in order to avoid abuses, good policies would need to be set in the system. I'm sure actual scientists would love a system like this. They would easily get to a consensus of how it must work and they would speculate and even publish in the blockchain about the implications of all of the considerations and policies.
I imagine this as a blockchain without a cryptocurrency. The incentive for maintaining live this blockchain would be knowledge accessibility and fixing academy bureaucracy and needs. This would be financed just how journals and research is already financed. It would be a public good were all contributing nodes must share expenses. It would also be cheaper than current inefficient and closed systems.
Nonetheless, even though I believe its a great idea and lots of scientists would love to be involved in a system like this, I think the academic elite would be quite reluctant to accept it. If steemit has accomplished this much, and contains lots and lots of junk posts and manages an immense amount of daily activity, I think something like this would be easy to implement and would have a great governance from the scientific community. What do you think?
Hi! Pluto is decentralized scholarly communication platform using blockchain.
We are interested in the problem of scholarly communication and are gathered to solve it. We aim to provide an autonomous and advanced scholarly communication powered by the contribution of the researchers, implementing the intermediary role of the existing publishers into the blockchain.
Homepage: https://pluto.network/ Medium : https://medium.com/pluto-network
Very interesting project . I'll definitely take a look.
Of course, very natural ideas. And very important, too, if we care about science. I like your spirit in "a blockchain without cryptocurrency". However a cryptocurrency might also be very useful to pay for reviewing the articles and -why not after all- maybe the authors as well...
It could be. However I think crypto currencies are too unstable and science already receives funding from other parties. Actually I originally thought that such cryptocurrency could be financed by all these grants science already gets. So entities that give the money for scientific research would actually have to buy the cryptocurrency and then give this to the scientists they are financing. But the fact that this currency be subject to volatility issues doesn't seem good to me. It could be, though. Thanks for your comment.
This would be more interesting for independent scientists who cannot get the funding to do what they'd really like because corporations and governments don't want to fund such things. Such as.... oh I'm sure you can think of plenty!