$19B a year
Academic publishing earns roughly nineteen billion dollars annually, at profit margins near 40% — higher than most large technology companies. Knowledge produced with public money sits behind paywalls.
Artizen Season 6 Proposal · Open Science Infrastructure
DeSci Onboarding Hub is an action-first playbook for people with zero Web3 or research background. It moves you from understanding decentralized science, to taking part, to staying — and to building a track record that counts.
A practical guide for Web3 converts and absolute beginners — built as a Chinese-language DeSci public good.
These are not isolated complaints. They are structural — and they are why a growing group of researchers stopped waiting for the system to repair itself.
$19B a year
Academic publishing earns roughly nineteen billion dollars annually, at profit margins near 40% — higher than most large technology companies. Knowledge produced with public money sits behind paywalls.
70% & 50%
Over 70% of researchers have failed to reproduce another lab's experiment; more than half could not reproduce their own. When results don't replicate, cumulative knowledge cracks at the base.
80% lost
Around 80% of raw research data from the 1990s is already gone for good. Findability falls about 17% every year after publication. Preservation was never treated as core infrastructure.
Sources — Wordsrated academic-publishing statistics · Nature (2016) reproducibility survey · Wiener-Bronner (2013) · Vines et al. (2014).
DeSci does not discard grants or existing institutions. It adds pathways the old system could not — redistributing who decides, when funding happens, and how contribution is recorded. Closer to institutional augmentation than revolution.
It is open infrastructure for scientific funding, intellectual property, and global collaboration — assembled from three working parts.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization
Decision-making and trust without a central gatekeeper — proposals, funding, and task allocation done in the open.
Distributed Ledger
Verifiable, immutable provenance records. Who contributed what, and when, stops being something a back office can quietly erase.
Embedded incentives
Funding loops that can sustain a project past a single grant cycle — with the market risk that comes with them named honestly.
The question DeSci reopens: once research exists, who decides how it is used? These three layers move provenance, licensing, and access from the back office to the front of the process.
Mechanism Auto-triggered release at milestones or patent expiry.
Example Early-contributor rights are protected first; the work then opens to the wider public good.
Mechanism Licensing terms encoded directly in smart contracts.
Example Academic users get free de-identified data and must return results; commercial users pay fees that flow back to the community.
Mechanism Digital provenance through IP-NFT and on-chain attestation.
Example A patient community is permanently recorded as an early contributor — not written out of the record.
Already in practice — Molecule and VitaDAO biopharma IP-NFTs · Ocean Protocol compute-to-data · CESS programmable data infrastructure.
An onboarding hub that oversells helps no one. The real test is balancing open access with real-world compliance — so the limits get equal billing.
There is no exam to pass before you start. Participation comes in stages, and each one leaves a record you can point to.
Read the materials, follow communities, and build a map of the field before acting.
Take on tasks, join discussions, complete bounties, and earn your first incentives.
Propose projects, run research or operations, and become a node others rely on.
Trust is built three ways at once — an on-chain footprint (Snapshot, Grants), reputation in forums and in person, and a verifiable track record anyone can check.
DAO contributions are career capital. Done in the open, they compound into something a future collaborator or employer can verify.
Apply to DeSci rounds — Gitcoin Grants, RetroPGF, and micro-grant programs that fund early work.
Move from one-off tasks into a core operator seat or a paid contributor position inside a DAO.
Use a public track record as the portfolio that opens doors into Web3 and research-adjacent work.
Help build the Chinese-language DeSci public good — and connect that community to the global ecosystem.
DeSci Onboarding Hub is open infrastructure for global DeSci entry — a stable node connecting researchers, academic and scientific community builders, and cross-boundary operators.
It works as a bridge — to the circles that distrust Web3, and to fields traditional academia undervalues. Three misconceptions it sets out to break:
This is just the beginning.
DeSci Onboarding Hub is applying through Artizen Season 6. Backing the proposal funds an open, multilingual playbook — and the community that keeps it current.