10. Blockchain for Science and Knowledge Creation

Blockchain is a computer protocol involving cryptography, a new way to look at databases, and a socio-cultural-legal-political-economic (r)evolution and knowledge creation will be affected by it. Blockchain has the capacity to make digital goods immutable, transparent, externally provable, decentralized, valuable, and distributed (and potentially permanent). Besides the initial experiment and data acquisition, all remaining parts of the research cycle could take place within a blockchain system. Attribution, data, subject anonymity, data post processing (e.g., via smart contracts) and archiving, publication, research evaluation, incentivization, and research fund distribution would thereby become time-stamped, comprehensible, open (at will), and provable to the external world. Currently, scientists must be trusted to provide a true and useful representation of their research results in their final publication; blockchain would make much larger parts of the research cycle open to scientific self-correction. This bears the potential to be a new approach to the current reproducibility crisis in science, and could “reduce waste and make more research results true”. Beyond that, blockchain could be used to reduce overhead, and accelerate the scientific process and incentivize true innovation.