Title
A protocol for decentralized academic research through impact evaluation
Team members
Mike & Oz
Short Summary of Your Improvement Idea
The improvement idea focuses on transforming the academic peer-review process with a decentralized, token-based system. By mapping academic papers to unique tokens and equating the citation process to token staking, this model aims to decentralize review decisions, incentivize contributions, and transparently assess the value of research outputs. The core innovation lies in leveraging blockchain technology to address the limitations of the current peer-review system, such as centralization, slow review cycles, and opaque impact assessment. This approach not only facilitates a more dynamic and equitable evaluation process but also introduces a novel mechanism for recognizing and rewarding academic contributions based on their real-world influence and utility. By implementing the protocol on a blockchain and promoting it through a scholarly paper and open-source code, the idea seeks to engage both academic and developer communities in a collaborative effort to refine, adopt, and scale this new model across various disciplines.
What is the existing target protocol you are hoping to improve or enhance?
The current target protocol for enhancement is the academic peer-review process. This traditional system is highly centralized, where the fate of scholarly work often rests in the hands of a few reviewers. It relies on manual, time-consuming reviews and lacks efficient, transparent mechanisms for gauging the long-term impact and value of research.
What is the core idea or insight about potential improvement you want to pursue?
The core idea revolves around integrating a decentralized, token-based protocol into the academic review and citation process. This would map academic papers to tokens, where citations are akin to token staking. Such a system aims to decentralize the review process, incentivize reviewers through tokenomics, and allow the academic community and the market to determine the value of research outputs in a more dynamic, transparent way.
What is your discovery methodology for investigating the current state of the target protocol?
Investigating the current state of the academic peer-review protocol would involve a mix of expert interviews to gather insights from within the academic communities, analysis of historical data on publication impacts and review efficiency, and studying specific failure events where the traditional peer-review process has been critiqued for bias, slowness, or inefficacy.
In what form will you prototype your improvement idea?
The improvement idea would initially be prototyped as a paper. Further development could involve coding a token-based protocol in EVM using solidity as an open-source project to allow for real-world testing and iteration.
How will you field-test your improvement idea?
The proposed protocol, by its very design, will serve as an ongoing field test. Once implemented, it will be tokenized.
Who will be able to judge the quality of your output?
The quality of the output will be universally judgeable by any academic researcher who engages with the system. Since the protocol aims to democratize and decentralize the review process, it inherently allows for a broad base of academics across disciplines to assess its effectiveness, fairness, and utility in facilitating scholarly communication and evaluation.
How will you publish and evangelize your improvement idea?
The improvement idea will be disseminated through two primary channels: a scholarly paper detailing the theoretical underpinnings, design considerations, and potential impacts of the protocol, and the actual protocol code, which will be implemented in Solidity for deployment on EVM-compatible blockchain platform.
What is the success vision for your idea?
The vision for success involves the widespread adoption of the token-based review system across multiple academic disciplines, leading to a more transparent, efficient, and fair evaluation of scholarly work. Success would also mean that researchers are more directly rewarded for impactful work through tokenomics, reducing the reliance on traditional funding and publishing models. Ultimately, the system should foster a more vibrant, inclusive, and rapid-cycle academic research environment.