Knowledge is freedom. Modern scientific publishing is a shitcoin. Decentralized publishing is future.
Please repost 🙏🏻🫂💜
TL;DR
Yesterday I spent 5 very productive hours during the flight. As some of you know already, my job and my passion is science. Besides doing fundamental research on a daily basis, I have to interact with the modern system of scientific publishing in order to create milestones and make my ideas supported by evidence accessible to the broader community. And oh boy, there’s only one thing that is worse than publishing a paper nowadays if you are a scientist like me, and that is applying for research grants to secure funding (but that’s a different topic).
The more I explore the #Bitcoin & #Nostr universe, the more I understand how, and more importantly, WHY these ecosystems are and will be so self-sufficient and self-sustainable in the long run. The decentralized protocol and PoW-based consensus rules lead to two key emergent phenomena: (1) trustless user<->protocol<->network communication; and (2) unambiguous proof of ownership. THIS is exactly what scientific publishing is still lacking despite a few recent attempts to improve the situation such as pre-print servers, public licenses, open review and Sci-Hub, just to name a few.
It goes without saying that the system in which a few big publishers that can install paywalls, pre-select scientific reviewers, reject manuscripts without sending to peer review leads nowhere. It allows the publishers to manipulate the society by (a) privatizing and misusing the copyrights; (b) downplaying some studies in favor of the others. It does NOT mean they always do this, but you will probably agree that having such a „backdoor“ is dangerous. The copyrights, and thus the freedom to propagate scientific knowledge, should belong only and only to those who have carried out a research study. At the same time, every expert should have the freedom to criticize a study of interest, thus validating or invalidating its conclusions.
I‘ve been working on a proposal for how the system can be improved by adopting the core principles underlying the #bitcoin and #nostr protocols. Although I mentioned it to a few plebs here on nostr privately, I now realize that I should systematize my ideas in a written form and share them with the nostr community. It will take time for me to accomplish this task and produce nice figures. And so I would be really happy you could share your ideas on the topic and/or repost this note 🫂💜
#plebchain #plebs #grownostr #nostrdev #devs #bitcoin
