In an interview between Lex Fridman and Balaji Srinivasan, the concept of advancing science through decentralization hit home when the latter introduced the concept of citation through import statements. This was positioned as “reproducible research” and aims to make scientific research more broadly available while also making it easier to reference scientific research through an open and immutable medium so that it is produced and shared in a more honest and open medium. The Open Access Movement have been pursuing this goal for many years, but it’s the profound statement of referencing academic papers through import statements that suddenly opened this decentralized world to me.
As of writing this, plagiarism in the academic centers have become an international conversation, stemming from the ousting of many prominent academics from Ivy League institutions and evolving to a politically polarizing argument. Whether this was done on accident or purposefully, the question of how to give due credit and cite sources has surfaced.
DeSci Labs is currently working on a way to easily cite scientific papers and it’s done in the following manner:
- The scientific content is hosted on the block chain: the code, the data, and the pdf
- Scientific content is accessed through libraries where import statements can reference the citation — but where the full utility comes into play is the nested citation of the original author by tracking the source of
Balaji calls this “reproducible science” or “composable science” and it solves a major problem. Often times scientific papers are neither accessible nor free, which closes off science to only the “initiated elite”. Academic institutions have created a moat in which only they can produce scientific content, and yet Satoshi Nakamoto is a pseudonymous person with no academic affiliation (that we know of) that gave us the Web3 ecosystem. Not only that, but historically we have had many scientific and mathematical breakthroughs from “amateurs” with no institutional association. Einstein’s annus mirabilis took place from the desk in a patent office, not at the university he tried hard to earn a position in.
With these open source libraries, anyone with a computer can work on their own scientific work, reliably publish it on-chain and be properly attributed for their work. Had this been available in the 17th Century, it could be argued that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz would have undeniable proof over who created calculus first.
In the example above, you can look at a scientific paper, in this case “Exploring Lupus Clouds” and explore not only the underlying data but the code itself. When I was writing my book “Manifest”, I was searching through many different books and scientific papers. I wrote my entire book in LaTex from the beginning and found it to be an incredible way of writing. Rather than simply using a word processor, the way in which I wrote was radically transformed from the start, by using metadata and attributions for my work, I was able to both write more efficiently but also embed credit in a way you can’t easily do on a word processor. To apply decentralized science to the mix— I would have been able to publish my book in a manner that would have eased my fears around plagiarism. (You do the best you can to cite your sources properly but plagiarism lies on a gradient that is both arbitrary and difficult to define).
This then leads to a solution to another issue in the academic community: funding. Academic funding is both difficult to come by and found to coalesce around the inner networks of those who distribute the funds. Much of our scientific advancement is bound by this principle and one could argue that it is preventing truly groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs from occurring. Most of the monumental shifts in science were met with disdain, distrust, and aggressive resistance. It is no different now when you want to push for an out-of-the-box idea — you’re faced with extreme pushback and called a charlatan. With the decentralized model, you can crowdsource funding through crypto which effectively cuts through the red tape.
The future is bright with decentralized science and import statements will help ensure the right researchers get the credit they are due, but can also keep authors at ease knowing their work is secure and etched in history in an immutable, referable manner.