Magna Carta Scientiae

Science is a catalyst for human progress. But a publishing monopoly and funding monopsony have inhibited research. We intend to improve incentives in science by developing smart research contracts. These will collectively reward scientific activities, including proposals, papers, replications, datasets, analyses, annotations, editorials, and more. Peer-to-peer review networks will be designed to help evaluate proposals and publications. Long term, these smart contracts help accelerate research by minimizing science friction, ensuring science quality, and maximizing science variance. Email bits@atoms.org or follow @atoms_org to help us build a flourishing research economy. Papers are the fundamental asset of the research economy: they serve as proof of work that valuable research has been completed. Funding agencies and research institutions evaluate scientists based on their publications. Principal investigators (PIs) attract prospective students and collaborators via papers. Investors and companies use scientific literature to conduct due diligence on research ranging from basic discoveries to clinical studies. Thus, the evaluation and dissemination of papers are vital to this research economy. Publishers are the sole arbiters of papers today. They assign a value -- denominated in "prestige" -- by accepting a paper into the appropriate journal based on selectivity and domain. To evaluate papers, journals typically outsource it to two or three PIs, who often outsource it further to their students. Reviewers are unpaid for this peer review work, as it is an expected part of their scientific duties. Peer review is believed to be necessary because of the industrialization of science. Research papers and proposals have become too specialized and too numerous, making it difficult to assess merit prima facie. As a result, scientific incentives have become distorted in two major ways: prestige capture and reviewer misalignment. Over half of all research papers in 2013 were published by five companies, who have used their centuries of brand equity to build an economic moat. This results in prestige capture, which akin to regulatory capture, causes public and scientific interest to be directed towards the regulators of prestige.