J2 SAY 08 Emi Velazquez OSN decentralized Research and open collaboration

hi so the scientific method is probably humanity's best invention but the science ecosystem and the incentives that exist are broken so we think we can help fix that using the blockchain hi everyone my name is Sameer alaska's I'm from Argentina and I'm here with my collaborators we want to present a little bit why we think that we can help with this problem so what does the scientists do in their day-to-day life they spend more than half their time looking for grants publishing like writing papers and other to get grants yeah and where does this grant money comes from normally from three institutions public in funding the European Union the United States you name it filling traffic foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and private corporations like Monsanto Pfizer whatever you can think but what is the real currency of a scientist it's the citations that they get is the papers that they publish is the things it's that kind of things that would let them get better positions more grant money and more funding so where is this research published in journals so journals they exist in 1776 and they have basically four qualities of things that they have to do they have to register who did what they had to store knowledge for the future distribute that information to the world and validate that information for example through peer review so we can already see how these are things that a block chain can help us accomplish but why is this a broken model basically we pay three times for the research that's done a researcher has to go and find grants normally from public institutions so we pay for that then a researcher has to normally pay in order to get that paper published in the journal and then the publisher charges for the access to that information and that information sometimes is paid by the general public and it's something that belongs to everyone so the general model is the investigator pay for the journal in order to get their information published then the journal owns the copyrights of that research the peer reviewers there are the people that has the expertise in the area and they're supposed to validate what the has been published in the paper don't get paid and then the public pays again through paywalls to subscription models we can cite for example Harvard had to scale down on the amount of journals that they have access to because he was getting too expensive so if Harvard can pay for it just imagine a university like in Argentina for example or anywhere else in the world so this creates bad side effects and bad incentives there's no incentive to reproduce research because who gets the citation the person that published the paper or the person that reproduced the paper or the experiment so the journals are not interested in public the publishing this because it doesn't get more attention for people that already saw the research that was done and there's no incentive because it's more more difficult for the researchers that publish is the first paper to standardize data in a way that it can be easily reproduced and takes more work to define the methods and everything that another team needs to validate this the other problem is publication bias so the thing is that the experts on the field that are in charge of doing the peer review of the process sometimes form the status quo it's the status quo that defines what's good science and what science that we shouldn't be researching on so publishers basically have become the information gatekeepers they restrict the flow of information just as the banks inhibits access to finance so there are centralized entities that control the flow of this information that belongs to humanity so what do we want to do with the open science network want to remove that source of authority and want to eliminate the need to monetize publishing we want to create different sets of tools for researchers that in turn can subsidize this publishing so there's no need to monetize it because if we only focus on monetizing the publishing I mean if we only do publishing that we need to monetize that publish and when I create incentives for less-popular the research that is needed so for example rare diseases that they don't have a commercial interest from pharma companies or from any commercial aspect that you can imagine we can create incentives that allows us to do this research and communities to organize to fund the necessary things for the research to happen so I'm just gonna give an example this is the polymath project so Tim Gower's in 2005 decided to solve a math problem by publishing in his blog this was the first time that they were trying to solve a math problem in a crowdsource way just opening up mass collaboration anyone can participate and basically after three months they managed to solve the problem there was over 40 people that participated and there were high school teachers from Australia filled medalist winners famous mathematicians but they managed to solve it and what is the thing with the polymath project is that it's very difficult to attribute the value that it was created by each one of these people in this problem sorry so one of the things that we're trying with the OSN and we're doing different experiments but what I want to talk to you today is how do we use token incentives to track the value created in a solution in a crowdsource problem so what do we need in order to do this first of all we need a blockchain ID at the centralized ID system that allows us to track the contributions and the value by every researcher around the world luckily we don't need to start this from scratch because they're already ID systems like Orkut that's used by between thirty thirty five percent of researchers worldwide and there's also universities IDs and the research ID network and we can use this in order to jumpstart our blockchain ID system and this will allow like multiple stakeholder access meaning that anyone around the world can participate and anyone around the world can receive funding for this research and enable smart contracts in the way that in order to interact with the smart contracts in the network they're gonna need a blockchain ID so this is a basic example like I said we have different experiments but this would be something based off the polymath project where we have three stakeholders we have the creator of the problem we have the reviewers and the contributors so the creator of the problem is someone that decides to throw a problem into the O's and network and he picks a set of reviewers can be as many as he wants the reviewers and the creators they each gets let's say a thousand tokens there are for this specific problem yeah so the contributors start adding contributions and the reviewers in the creator can give these tokens to the contributions depending on the value that they think they generated when a certain contribution crosses a threshold let's say 500 tokens that person becomes a super contributor and we assign an extra thousand tokens to that person to give to others yeah so this is our way to try to experiment to see if we can map the value attributions in this problem so the contract is always waiting for a paper proposal that this can be done by the main researcher or by anyone in the network when that proposal is accepted is published instantly and the funding that the country could receive from people that wants to incentivize the search of the solution here gets distributed based on the value attributions that we're mapping so the incentive in this case is that the creator of the research which is the one that's going to try to get people to work on it is gonna get the reviewers they get a percentage of the funding it says 5% but it can be determined the reviewers itself they also get a percentage which is distributed between how many reviewers there are and the others is proportional to the amount of tokens that they have for the attribution in this case we're funding given the the funding after the case but that doesn't have to be the case we can do it before we can do it in stages and [Music] so why is it good to distribute through this contract basically because we have the blockchain ID the tracks who did what and it's open for any researcher worldwide and all research successful or not is published which is a very important thing and it's linked to the data and all of the contributions that happen so teams worldwide don't repeat the same thing over and over again so how do we do publication basically the current model for journals comes from copying the model of papers and magazines but there's no need for us to keep doing this this is just a network effect we have a kid hub style versioning system that allows us the document to live in a constant stage of pure viewing and evolution depending on the new information that we get all content is published instantly completely free the files are stored in ipfs and this allows us also to create bounty incentives if you're anyone in the world that you think that this information should be more validate it then you can do a bounty on the peer-review process so once we have mapped all of these connections and all of this interactions between researchers and the papers at the publish we can do some interesting funding mechanisms this are just a few examples I'm sure people can think already about different ones but for example we can do bounty based research this could be done by individuals communities corporations people I won't see organized around the idea like I said before with rare diseases people can organize in order to fund more research this we can do a basic income model where there's already [Music] publications where for example they say there was a paper published that they said that we should give researchers a basic salary or for example $100,000 a year they get to keep 50,000 and the rest they have to distribute it to other research that they feel that they are doing good research yeah so I mean we all just saw their presentation by circles it was very interesting so I'm sure we're gonna talk to collaborate later but this follows the blue sky approach which is not all research is done by problem solution sometimes you just need to look at the sky and think and lastly we can use tokens to incentivize data gathering connecting to data market places and provide more information for researchers okay lastly there's very interesting research being done by the financial engineering department at MIT by Andrew Lowe and Rogers Stane sorry my throat where they're thinking about investing in pharma as securities as financial securities because if a clinical trial you spend 200 million dollars you have 1 in 20 chance of succeeding and it takes 20 years yeah so what if instead of investing in 1 we invest in 20 at the same time that gives you a 98 percent of a potential investment return so this is something that we can map with crypto assets with tokens we're not doing this now but this is an idea for the future well pending problems scalability we all here have the same problem so particularly for OS n is legal compliance anything related to patents and intellectual property which is the problems with having researchers working worldwide and how do you fix the problems with that and a way to standardize global grants evasion processes where we are what we need we need researchers we need people who wants to contribute to the project we need research topics we all talk about scalability issues were thinking about eating our own dog food in the sense that when to solve the OS and scalability problems with the O's and network so thank you very much and we're going to be here my mouth of Velasquez and Mike our collaborators so if you wanna meet us after the conference to talk about this over thank you hey see thank you for the talk first of all I'm not a researcher by any sense of the word but I am super interested in science I am interested in science and the research that other people produce so it's it's interesting that there are different approaches to how to solve journals and stuff because that's a frustration as someone who consumed science that everything's pay wold and the economics of that whole space is kind of up if I can say that I guess my question to you would be you'd mentioned that circles the previous talk kind of overlapped and there was a possibility of collaboration what again blue sky anything possible like what would you see that collaboration is being Thanks so we really need to to expand more about how could it be possible because one of the things with providing a basic income for researchers is to how do you know the research how you know the identity how you prevent potential civil attacks so like I said those those are basic ideas that that we need to develop to see how is possible to accomplish them not even paid as good exercise hello hello University of party in France I work in a laboratory and well what you propose is kinda interesting for the research field but you start with a very interesting point you said the the the the system is broken and one of the premises of your work is based on trust research are supposed to give them extra money like this that they received to other researchers based on the work that the other researchers have done and right now at least from my point of view reached research field is a mafia their friends who held each other they hold each other and they keep published publishing only stuff among themselves if they are supposed to be giving money to other people who are working how do you see that they overcome this mafia problem in which they will only be giving money to their own friends and not to the work that deserves to be paid for okay so it's it's similar to the idea of the the basic income that was published I'm gonna link I'll show you later when we finish the paper that was polish about that because yeah and in that case it is it is a problem and the idea with this is not to change right away the entire incentives Network so that's why we want to start with blockchain problems with problems that are easily proven on paper so not connecting to hardware or laboratories yeah and start mapping the incentives and that's also the idea of bringing more research to the conversation that like you know about the current problems so we don't just create this that's the basic idea is not replicating the same model on a blockchain you know it's like going step by step and defining new new incentives thank you nothing else okay thank you very much [Applause]