Innovating Academia From The Outside - The Web3 Solution to Academia’s Peer Review Problem

ResearchHub is a platform for open science that has been building an impressive tech stack since 2020, where users can review, publish, and collaborate on scientific research. The primary novelty that seems to interest and terrify researchers in equal measure is the fact that it is a crypto based project, funded by Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong. I fall into the category of being enthusiastic about the potential for blockchain, so have been following their progress closely and have recently been super impressed by just the sheer levels of innovation on the platform. Interestingly, I first spoke to the now COO Patrick Joyce in 2018, when he had founded a company called co-lab (later rebranded to knowledgr) and caught up with him and his colleague Jeff Koury recently to discuss some of the new features and aims for the project in the short and long term.

ResearchHub has similarities to the Open Science Framework (OSF). Both platforms encourage researchers to share their work openly, facilitating collaboration and reproducibility. Both platforms provide tools for sharing data, preprints, and research resources, which seems like an obvious next step in research dissemination, but the incentives for researchers are often a stumbling block, in a slow to evolve, publish or perish, metrics driven career path. ResearchHub’s token-based system encourages researchers to contribute by rewarding uploads, reviews, and discussions. This token economy model presents a novel approach to sustaining community engagement in a field where recognition and reward have often been limited to formal publications and citations.

Paid peer review.

One of the most innovative aspects of ResearchHub is its approach to peer review. Traditionally, peer review is an unpaid and under-appreciated part of academic research. ResearchHub changes this by offering ResearchCoin (RSC) rewards for high-quality peer reviews, ensuring that peer review is timely, constructive, and valued. If you have ever caught me having a beer after a conference you will know that I believe peer review is the most fundamentally broken part of academic publishing today. As the data above from Dimensions shows, there is ever increasing demand for peer reviewers, without an ever increasing supply of researchers. With gold open access driving a "solve for X model", where X is the number of APCs you can publish in a high quality manner, we end up with a huge "strain on scientific publishing".

Other platforms have experimented with alternative models to improve peer review. Publons, for instance, allows researchers to showcase their review contributions, providing non-monetary recognition. eLife has pioneered transparent peer review, where reviewer comments are made open and visible. MDPI Reviewers who provide timely and substantial comments will receive a discount voucher code entitling them to an APC reduction. ResearchHub combines these concepts.

It seems to be working...

Proof that incentivized peer review is changing the game. pic.twitter.com/xhOFdd2CqS

— ResearchHub Foundation (@ResearchHubF) October 25, 2024

ResearchCoin tokenomics have been designed based on token engineering principles centred around the concept of the Web3 Sustainability Loop. This implies that the primary focus has always been on growing the ecosystem while ensuring its long-term self-sustainability.

How this works in the ResearchHub model is played out here. My original concern was that when looking at the green inflows and red outflows, there are not enough green inflows to sustain the constant rewards and payments.

This may be about to change with their move into Open Access Publishing and the launch of their first journal. The $1000 fee with a promise of fast turn around in theory solves the problem of "where is the monetary inflow coming from".

While token incentives drive engagement, they may also risk attracting contributions motivated by rewards rather than quality. Addressing this tension will be key to ResearchHub’s long-term credibility. Like any open platform, ResearchHub faces the risk of misuse, such as self-promotion or posting lower-quality content. Ensuring content moderation while preserving openness is an ongoing challenge.

There are a few more innovative touches to the platform that subtly reflect how slow innovation in the sector has been from new start-ups in the last 5 years. I feel there was a wave of new academic technology moving the needle 15 years ago, and we are on the crest of a second wave now. Their integration with an ID verification service is something that could help prevent bad behaviour that we see in the form of citation rings. Incentives for open data is something that is coming at exactly the right time. The platform pulls from Open Alex in the backend and encourages uploading open access papers in a way that Researchgate and Academia.edu have done in the past - but again, the incentive here is financial.

In speaking with Patrick, he shared that they were looking to really innovate in the way research is funded as a priority. I remember experiment.com struggling to have wider reach than the friends and family funding of research that seemed to max out under $20,000. By engaging directly with the funders themselves, ResearchHub could use their tech stack to disrupt the dissemination of funding and add more fuel to their internal incentives economy.

I’m really excited to see a real world attempt to do paid peer review well. It is as close to paying researchers cash as I have seen and whilst it is early, engagement so far seems encouraging. A barrier to entry right now is explaining tokenomics to normie researchers. Luckily for them, a whole web3 industry is moving to educate and solve account abstraction so that researchers wont ever need to understand the rails that is driving them to behave the way they do. Their SciCon event takes place next week, and I'll be dialling in through their innovative token-gated livestream.