How to improve science and scientific publishing by tokenizing it.

Balaji made the observation that putting research "on chain" could greatly improve scientific progress and reduce gate-keeping.

I agree and here is how I would design it.

Create a reproducibility token for any research claim.

The scientific claim will be tokenized and will allow anyone to read the research, when it was made and to validate/reproduce in order to strengthen/weaken the claim.

Instead of focusing on peer review we measure reproducibility/verification after it's published on the chain.
The token would increase in value with the strengthening of the claimed findings of the research i.e. its reproducibility. Tokens with no reproducibility rank lower.

Instead of it being a binary "published" or "not”, everything can be published but not everything will rise up to the scrutiny of scientific rigor.

Think of it as a scale of reproducibility where anyone can claim and anyone can try to reproduce/validate.

This is a much more precise (hint scientific) way of understanding most scientific claims and is important especially in the fields of psychology, sociology, climate science and economic disciplines.

Very simplified the purpose is to incentivize three outcomes.

• The researchers who will be able to gain reputation for putting forward something that could end up being reproducible and be more careful about not putting badly researched work out.
• Other researchers who will be able to "disprove a study" and thus gain reputation as good "debunkers" (maybe every research claim token comes with an anti-token).
• The DAO will be a place you would want to go to get your work scrutinized and avoid if you are worried about it being exposed for the whole world to verify.

Most scientific progress starts not with "eureka!" but "hmm that's interesting" and by providing a much more fluid scale much more research which is currently underrepresented could see the day of light judged on its reproducibility not gatekeepers and peer-reviewers biases.

As an added benefit research can be made anomalously while still making sure the value is captured by the authors of the paper (as it stays with the token)

Reproducibility is also not the only goal from my perspective, but it could get us closer to what u/DavidDeutschOxf calls "hard-to-vary explanations" which IMO is what all scientific progress is built on.

Thoughts, critique? Hit reply to weigh in.