In the centralized world errors in the scientific publication process are irreversible. If a key article is wrongly published, it may block the entire science (and thus the world economy). Any scientific research in the archives is supposed to be peer-reviewed appropriately before being published so that we trust it with confidence. But the predatory journals and publishers are publishing articles that have not gone through a rigorous peer review.
At the other hand, some of the researchers are not properly advertising their research due to which only those who are searching through the right keywords know about it. As a result, the other researchers studying the same topic won’t publish their research because it has been already published but not marketed properly making the research unpublishable and the science stuck.
So to solve this problem Victor Porton has created an impact DAO intended to “unstuck” fundamental science and improve the financing of free software development, especially of underfinanced software components.
Our initial strategy to improve the existing crypto grants ecosystem consists of these items:
- We will offer the donor to use a part of his/her donation for cites/dependencies. The same applies to software components: They are invisible and so often don’t receive enough donations. Now we offer the donor to allocate a part of his/her donation to direct and indirect dependencies of a software package or science article.
- We need an affiliate referral program for donations. Especially, because somebody may (intentionally or not intentionally) block the development of others by publishing an important discovery but not advertising it loudly, so that only persons who repeat the same discovery will find suitable keywords to find it and therefore will not publish, too, so making a topic in science non-publishable, and if it is a key topic the science stuck. If somebody does not advertise his discovery, let affiliates do it.
- Early adopters (early donors) will be rewarded from the future donations, to facilitate early adoption of basic science and software components.
- We will scan existing APIs of software and science (e.g. crates.io and SemanticScholar) for dependencies and offer dependencies’ authors a timeframe to get their part of the donations.
- Users could specify their crypto addresses for donations (simultaneously for all their projects) using their public profiles on GitHub and similar sites.
When proper paid SEO will be applied to scientific texts and grants, the problem of mispublication will vanish as the key scientific results will go to the top of SERPs.
Here is the draft whitepaper that deals mainly with the details how we plan to use the ICP blockchain.