The current scientific research system is slow and broken
- Getting funding for research is difficult and time-consuming. This makes it hard to start research without funding.
- Publishing a paper can take months to years. After that, papers are usually hidden behind a paywall controlled by publishers.
- Peer review is voluntary, and the process lacks transparency and is prone to bias. This makes it hard to share new discoveries to the world.
- Collaboration is limited between scientists and anyone else interested (eg. investors, entrepreneurs) because publishers hide scientific discoveries behind paywalls.
- Many experiments cannot be reproduced and replicated. This makes it hard to verify if results are real.
These are the bottlenecks in science that RSC and ResearchHub plan to solve.
What is RSC and its purpose?
ResearchCoin (RSC) is the governance and reward token of the ResearchHub platform.
The ResearchHub Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) governs the ResearchHub platform. You can think of a DAO like a co-op. The DAO consists of a core team of active contributors and other community members.
As a governance token, RSC enables shared community ownership where the community can lead growth, development and self-sustainability of the ResearchHub ecosystem.
As a reward token, the goal of RSC is to align incentives and behaviours in the scientific process that help speed up the pace of scientific research.
What are the use cases of RSC?
Here are the ways you can use RSC right now:
1) As a governance token
Having RSC allows you to vote on various proposals and key decisions for the community. Voting occurs on a platform called Snapshot. Check out past proposals here.
Here’s an example of a recent proposal the community voted on:
2) For bounties
Eg. ask a scientific question on ResearchHub and offer a bounty to crowdsource high quality responses:
3) Reward / tip users for providing quality content
The type of contribution can be a comment for discussion, summary, or even peer review (yes you read that right!)
4) Get a DOI for your post on ResearchHub
More ways of using RSC are always being discussed and added by the community. The more meaningful use cases there are for RSC, the more sustainable and stable the RSC economy will be in the long-term.
These are some future ideas planned for using RSC:
- fund research projects
- social features, such as badges and user profile flair
- automatically unlock paid features at ResearchHub (for free!)
Got a fantastic use case idea? Get involve in the ResearchHub DAO and share it! Discuss your ideas with other members in the Discord or at one of the ResearchHub weekly community calls.
How can you get RSC?
Buy on exchanges
Currently you can buy and sell RSC on Uniswap.
Note: there is only a small amount of liquidity on there
Contribute to earn
- Answering open scientific bounties on the ResearchHub platform.
- Providing quality content on ResearchHub that gets upvoted or supported with RSC.
- Assisting in community tasks on Dework
As ResearchHub is also community-led project, there are different types of tasks available for anyone in the community to do and get paid in RSC!
(For example, this blog post is a bounty task I applied for on Dework)
Types of tasks available:
- Marketing & Outreach – like communicating, creating content and sharing it to world?
- Treasury Management – wanna help ensure the financial sustainability of the DAO’s treasury?
- Open source development – enjoy coding, fixing issues and forking things on GitHub?
- Suggest a task – feel like none of the above apply to you but have something to contribute?
RSC Tokenomics
- Token name: ResearchCoin
- Token symbol: RSC
- Token type: ERC-20
- Total supply: 1 billion RSC
- Initial circulating supply: 30 million RSC
- Circulating supply will increase by: 50 million RSC per year
- Smart contract address: 0xd101dcc414f310268c37eeb4cd376ccfa507f571
See the price chart here
RSC Token allocation
What’s my take?
I was stoked when I found out about ResearchHub. It’s the first decentralized science (DeSci) project I came across and they are trying to solve real major problems in the current way we do science. I believe in the vision and mission of ResearchHub and RSC and so do many other passionate early adopters in the community.
It’ll be exciting to watch how ResearchHub and DeSci as a whole progresses in the next few years. The fun and cool part is that the community can take part in the building process and have co-ownership of the project – thanks to crypto and web3 tools.
(if you’re reading this article, you’re probably early and down some DeSci rabbithole, why not join us in this mission?)
Get Involved
Wanna help the bring the vision of RSC and the ResearchHub Ecosystem to life? Then join us!
- Create an account on ResearchHub and start posting
- Follow on Twitter
- Join the Discord
- Join the subreddit
- Subscribe to the YouTube channel
- Follow the Github
- Follow on LinkedIn
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