Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - UNIFIED SCIENCE (THE FIRST ACADEMIC SOCIAL NETWORK CREATOR THAT EMPOWERS RESEARCHERS TO COLLABORATE, CONTROL PRIVACY AND INCREASE THEIR IMPACT)

Teaser

\"Publishing in academic journals is the prevailing mode of certifying and disseminating academic knowledge, but the wealth-creation model in this system is broken. First, the society and the tax payers pay for the research & reporting in academic journals. Then universities...

Summary

\"Publishing in academic journals is the prevailing mode of certifying and disseminating academic knowledge, but the wealth-creation model in this system is broken. First, the society and the tax payers pay for the research & reporting in academic journals. Then universities give out the articles & copyright for free to publishers, who price the content so aggressively, that many students, researchers, and libraries cannot afford the journals they have contributed in. In this setting the academic publishers rake in all the profit and boast higher profit margins than e.g Google.

According to the feasibility study we conducted, there is a deep sense of injustice in academia about the dominance of major academic publishers. Consequently, there was high interest towards new alternatives to break the dominance of the leading players in the current value chain. However, many academics were deeply sceptical about the new solutions published so far, because most of them are using the so called “platform economy” service models, which means:

- Centralized governance & unfair use of power once dominant position is reached
- “Uberising” the contributors (researchers)
- (Undisclosed) business models
- Advertisement ridden UX
- Ambiguous privacy policies
- Geopolitical dominance (USA)

To address the unfair value distribution our study assessed the feasibility of introducing a platform for collaborative local economy, based on a mutual credit system & powered by distributed ledger technology (DLT). To ensure privacy and safeguard the researchers against \"\"uberisation\"\", we investigated how to implement a decentralised personal data management; where each node keeps their scores of contributions separately from the other nodes; with only data subjects themselves having the full record of all contributions across the nodes in their private “Unified Science wallet”.

The notion of decentralised personal data management is central for the EU Next Generation Internet initiative (NGI). In the NGI-administered LEDGER program, Mesensei is now continuing to develop the technologies needed for Unified Science. The work is connected to delivering human centric digital services of the future and to present GDPR-compliant alternatives to the US and Chinese -based platform giants.

Financially, if the concept is successful, Unified Science taps into enormous Global R&D market with expenditure €1.6 trillion with 92% being spent in North America, Asia and the EU. Segmenting an estimated 10% of the overall market to ICT expenses within this sector, the addressable market amounts to €19.2bn in the EU and €160bn globally.
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Work performed

The study established widespread frustration in the academia with the academic journal publishers, as well as with the whole publishing merits -based academic reputation ranking system.

The dominant academic publishers were considered as exploitative and perceived to be seeking disproportionate profits at the expense of researchers and publicly-funded academic establishments. This sentiment was shared almost identically among academics regardless if we interviewed researchers, librarians, heads of departments, or rectors, and regardless whether the informants were from Finland, UK, Denmark or Belgium. The results were the same also both in large high ranking universities, and in smaller regional institutions. This leads to prediction that it is only a matter of where and when the current system breaks. However, since universities are very traditional institutions with deeply rooted cultures, a complete transition can take at least one or two academic generations.

The technical feasibility study focused on exploring three strands of DLTs: Blockchain, Tangle, and Holochain.

We assumed that blockchain technologies are the strongest candidates for building scalable incentivisation models to boost collaboration. The assumption was based on technology maturity, available platforms to build on, widespread usage, and access to well documented case study research. However, during the project we discovered that both variants of blockchain technology — traditional mining based proof-of-work and the delegated proof-of-stake — have started to face classical problems of free-market -based institutions: e.g., what is the financial policy; how to prevent accumulation of power; and how to control price volatility and cope with speculation. In addition, the proof-of-work -based blockchains have the problem of rising transaction costs. Furthermore, questions about GDPR compliancy (e.g. right to forget) were raised.

Thus we concluded, that use of existing blockchain platforms to deliver Unified Science is not as straightforward as originally assumed.

Tangle approached solving the scalability and institutional issues by having humans to verify the transactions. The model seemed appealing, since the idea of human made verification is compatible with academic collaboration model: a person posts a contribution, another verifies that the poster and the article are both legitimate. While the concept is appealing on an abstract level, building it into functional technology with a great user experience for the academics turned out to be problematic. In addition, the technology itself has not yet proven to sustain decentralized governance in open large-scale implementations (without authority intervention).

Holochain was the last technology we investigated. The project had published a constant stream of new cases and documents. Scientific research had also been conducted on it by our collaborator researchers at Aalto University. However, at the time of submitting this periodic report, Holochain’s p2p networking part was still under development and immature to the point that the evaluation was done on a conceptual level.

However with what is known, it seems that conceptually, ideologically, and technically Holochain\'s approach seems to be the most aligned with the ethos of academic collaboration and to the needs of data & privacy protection. Firstly, Holochain is natively compatible with the idea of building a network of local economies instead of just one single economy. Secondly, instead building a scarcity-based system which may work with rivalrous assets, the Holochain model implements an economic system based on mutuality–which is more compatible with non-rival assets, such as academic knowledge.

Final results

To progress beyond the state of the art Unified Science needs to be radically different compared to the previous generation of centralised platforms and the two sided market models. Key challenge is to address the failings of centrally governed technologies and seek alternatives for the exploitative business models, which are both inherent to the market dominance seeking mindset of incumbent Internet platforms.

Instead of a centralised aggregation platform Unified Science project is evolving into a business, technical, and governance framework, which can be used to set-up independent nodes in the context of academic collaboration. Unified Science seeks to introduce 1) customisable local economy based on mutual credit for tracking & rewarding contributions and 2) decentralised personal data management to safeguard privacy & prevent monopolistic centres of power from emerging.

The next stage in the project is to build a MVP in the LEDGER program, and to deliver the first validated business case for a paradigm shifting next generation Internet platform.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.unifiedscience.eu.