This repo aspires to track the progress of the Web3 community as it utilizes cryptography, incentive engineering, and p2p networks to solve problems in Open Science. Inspired by https://www.arewewebyet.org/.
This is work in progress and we need your contributions! Open an issue to start a conversation about a problem, a project, or a way forward.
The obstacles to Open Science listed below are tagged with these status emojis:
🔧 There are established communities surrounding tooling for this problem.
🌵 People are working on this! But expect thorns
💀 To our knowledge, nobody is working on this
| Problem | Details | State | Projects |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🔧 Archival | How do we preserve research papers AND data? As universities and libraries are threatened with closures, how do we help research outlast the institutions that have been their stewards so far? | Several projects are incentivizing long term content hosting. | Arweave is pay-once-store-forever storage for smaller datasets. Filecoin is pay as you go storage for large datasets. |
| 🌵 Access control | How do we ease sharing of data between researchers who should have access without leaking data to people who shouldn't have access? | Access control is harder in p2p networks, but some projects are working on this. | Ocean Protocol uses "data wallets" to control data access. IPFS can share encrypted files. |
| 💀 Extremely large datasets | |||
| 💀 Exchange with formats following open standards | Maybe IPLD is useful here? Or Ceramic? | ||
| 💀 Provenance information | Maybe IPLD is useful here? Or Ceramic? | ||
| 💀 Metadata preservation | Maybe IPLD is useful here? Or Ceramic? | ||
| 💀 Annotating datasets / Linking associated datasets | A medical dataset may have multiple researchers annotating or segment it. How can we preserve that relationship? | Maybe IPLD is useful here? Or Ceramic? | |
| 💀 Search for related datasets |
| Problem | Details | State | Projects |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💀Attribution | |||
| 🔧 Funding | How can we steer funding towards research? | There are solid projects around founding research, primarily in research tools and software. | Gitcoin has routed millions of dollars towards "public goods," largely software. EthGlobal has regular hackathons rewarding product implementations and ideas. Many DAOs are rallying around organizing funding for science. |
| Problem | Details | State | Projects |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💀 High thoughput | |||
| 🌵 Reproducible | How can we verify computatinoal research claims? | As web3 storage matures, frameworks that take advantage of them are appearing. | Holium provides a framework for describing data pipelines, including their histories. |
| 💀 Multi-threading, GPU accelerated | Golem is a Ethereum based marketplace for computation which has recently added GPU support. |