BIO & ResearchHub: A Symbiotic DeSci Relationship
Co-founded by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, ResearchHub is a “modern-day preprint server that incentivizes the open publication of transparent research” through its ‘rewards for reviews’ model.
Instead of peer reviews getting stalled behind paywalls and the ivory towers of academia, ResearchHub offers researchers an accessible, no-cost environment to collaborate on scientific research more efficiently.
ResearchHub serves as an important de-risking engine for BioDAOs, community-owned R&D networks that develop tokenized biotech assets in specific areas of scientific research. BioDAOs can use ResearchHub to request and provide peer reviews, run micro-experiments and ultimately to de-risk and improve their deal flow.
Read on to learn more about what this collaboration looks like in action and how BioDAOs and their members (patients, scientists and biotech entrepreneurs) leverage ResearchHub to turn early-stage research into valuable scientific intellectual property.
Incentivizing Breakthrough Research
At its core, BIO is engineered to accelerate the R&D of BioDAOs through decentralized funding, liquidity, and incentives.
ResearchHub builds on this focus through its incentivized peer review model, which does just that: rewards researchers who submit peer reviews (grouped in ‘Hubs’ per the area of research so that it's easy to find what you’re interested in) with ResearchCoin tokens. Besides getting rewarded with tokens when performing a peer review, users can earn additional tokens depending on how many upvotes their peer reviews get. More upvotes = more tokens.
Participants can also request services on ResearchHub by creating “grants” to further incentivize other users to engage with their posts.
The success of this incentivized research approach has led to a recent spike in the number of ResearchHub-powered peer reviews across the DeSci ecosystem in recent months.
In a first for the DeSci ecosystem, women’s health BioDAO, AthenaDAO, co-funded and hosted multiple women’s health studies on ResearchHub for topics like the effects of surgical menopause and advanced health tracking for female athletes. Notably, the researchers who received funding for their experiments were completely new to Web3.
VitaDAO has also leveraged ResearchHub’s grant feature to assess the current longevity biomarker landscape through a community-driven literature review paper.
Why pay to publish in a TradSci journal when you can raise funds from a community of like-minded peers who have a real incentive to help amplify your work? ResearchHub and BioDAOs are answering this question in real-time.
Targeting Scientific Verticals
Using the new targeted grant feature on ResearchHub, BioDAOs can tailor requests for peer reviews from scientists specializing in specific fields, eg., CryoDAO, the cryogenics BioDAO, could request feedback and peer review exclusively from ResearchHub’s global network of cryogenics experts.
Onramp to Onchain Funding
ResearchHub acts as an environment for initial validation before an experiment graduates to later-stage funding from BioDAOs and the public via intellectual property tokenization frameworks (IP-Tokens).
The process by which scientists, patients and BioDAOs can use both ResearchHub and the BIO Protocol is as follows:
- Have an idea
- Get it peer reviewed; improve the project manuscript
- Attract funding from BioDAOs
- Tokenize your project by selling IP-Tokens to BioDAOs and/or the public
- BIO protocol incentivizes BioDAOs to fund science by emitting BIO tokens (bio/acc rewards) to BioDAOs that fund/develop IP-Tokens
- Each BioDAO uses its treasury to pay for peer reviews/experiments on ResearchHub in service of their existing portfolio projects, or to support the creation of new projects
Biotech Symbiosis
As the DeSci stack evolves, ResearchHub will continue to help BioDAOs execute peer reviews, host pre-print forums, and drive high-quality biotech projects into their research pipeline. On the flip side, BioDAOs drive scientific challenges to ResearchHub as well as the funds to incentivize reviews, ultimately allocating larger pools of capital to ideas that get validated.
It's a collaboration that's only getting started.
Learn more about ResearchHub
Join BIO Genesis
ResearchHub Coin (RSC) was selected as a Genesis network token in the BIO Genesis community launch, which ends November 13 2024. During BIO Genesis, users can swap eligible DeSci tokens like RSC for BIO tokens, in order to receive BIO before the token becomes transferable. This results in BIO protocol receiving RSC in its treasury, further aligning incentives between the BIO and ResearchHub communities.