To Be Determined

In Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s recent podcast w/ Balaji Srinivasan called “Optimizing Your Inputs” among several interesting thought chains on a concept called the information diet, Balaji talks about blockchain in such a spirited way it is practically contagious. His idea of moving academia on chain to improve visibility and accountability and ultimately streamline the exponentially growing body of research caught my ear.

It’s a promising solution to an environment that has been so caught up in outdoing its own weird incentives for a long while now – but Balaji seems to think that the chain will somehow magically align the incentives of the publishers. I didn’t see how this could possibly be the case simply by setting up publications on chain and stopping there.

Sure, it could vastly improve the open-access, article processing fee-hungry value-prop of legacy publishers.. If I was a publisher, I wouldn’t know exactly what my value prop looked like in 10 years and I’d be scrambling to move on-chain. And that’s just it, the existing journals-on-chain look like ScienceMatters (which appears to have since shut down..), while Orvium and Pluto are academia-on-chains where integration with traditional journals is an afterthought. Ovrium even has its own “Decentralized Autonomous Journal,” true to the spirit of the times.

All of the solutions seem to be prioritizing publisher agnostic approaches, and this only boosts their value prop IMO. Here is a great graphic from Mackey et al. (2019) on the academic DAO. I’ve linked it below, they go about analyzing various approaches to on-chain academia where they discuss the complexities of aligning incentives in full, it’s great [1]. Granted, the space has evolved much, mostly in that a lot of the complexity in driving alignment of incentives and driving engagement has borne out.

Interestingly, the danger here is that the DAO will rely heavily on existing journals to reach critical mass, as you might say. Publishers, authors, and reviewers all have some complex incentives to align, and setting rules for validation of nodes or setting voting rules could prove too complex

What we have then, is the natural progression of things – the DAO becomes contained entirely within the ecosystem of the publisher, simplifying the participation in the DAO to only reviewers and publishers, mediated by Ethereum’s smart contracts on chain.

While this kind of defeats the purpose of the DAO in that the organization would be entirely self-contained within an independent entity, it’s still not a bad place to be. It’d still ultimately increase the transparency of the academic publications themselves and importantly, the process of doing so, while simultaneously democratizing and distributing the review process. Imo, it’s pretty obvious the next progression is to think about how to tokenize the research incentives in specific verticals and perhaps drive scientific exploration and finance research entirely on chain. The distributive effects could be momentous. R&I is traditionally an extremely high-return investment in modern economies, but that is eaten by administrative costs. Imagine what might happen if we flattened that network entirely.

Augmentation

[1] Mackey et al. paper on on-chain academia, A Framework Proposal for Blockchain-Based Scientific Publishing Using Shared Governance. Really thorough, if not a little dated, look at why to be skeptical but hopeful towards on-chain journals