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.
